Mapping the Future

When my daughter, Abby, and I travel, she navigates from the map on her phone while I drive.

The first time we tried this, we were looking for our hotel in Memphis in the dark.

Construction blocked the hotel’s front door.

I missed the frontage road and then we circled the parking lot entrance four times.

Abby’s directions just didn’t make sense.

It’s possible that I expressed my doubts in a way that sounded critical to Abby.

It’s possible that she was right.

We have come a long way since that dark hotel search.

Now Abby gives me plenty of time to switch lanes and I read exit numbers.

So when my mom and I took Abby to her university in Houston last weekend, I trusted Abby’s navigation.

Houston is flat, with no landmark mountains as references for east or west.

I didn’t yet have a physical map to find other types of landmarks – major thoroughfares, the city grid or the Gulf of Mexico.

But Abby directed us so we turned right and left until we found her school.

Then we unpacked her suitcases and put her dorm room together.

Suddenly, I realized my mom and I needed to find our way back to the hotel without Abby’s navigation.

And Abby needs to navigate her education without my map of experiences.

And I need to sort through how to live my life now that my days are no longer bookended by what my kids need.

My mom and I knew our immediate goal was to get back to our temporary bed.

Abby has a clear sense of her educational goals. This week, she is beginning to develop a mental map to reach those goals.

I get to reset my goals if I want, then map out how to reach them.

All of us have only our instincts and experiences to direct us.

My mom and I found our hotel quickly.

The next morning on our drive from downtown to the airport, we only had to turn around three times.

By then, we had a physical map, but the tiny print was hard to read in the dark of 5 am. I didn’t trust the navigation directions on Mom’s phone – turns out I was right to follow my instincts because the directions missed important details.

We made it to the airport with plenty of time.

During Abby’s orientation week, she is meeting kids who have had far more opportunities than she had at Conrad High School yet have never pulled a chilled calf from an icy creek during a snowstorm.

She gets to navigate how to convert her ranch skills, determination and tenacity into urban academic success.

Abby already knows where she is going; I’m no longer sure.

Both of us might use several forms of maps to get there.

A physical map offers context and a sense of direction that helps me understand where I am in the world – until I don’t have enough light to read it.

The electronic map works well as long as the inputs are up to date.

That inner map of intuition is almost always right, as long as I have the context of the world in my mind.

But the most important map might be the map of experience -- the map of applying the skills and lessons already learned to the current situation.

This map is enhanced by friends and family who remind us of where we’ve been while we are aiming for a new place.

Abby and I are fortunate to have access to all of these maps.

We will use all of them to get where we want to go.