Why Now is the Best Time to Learn New Navigational Skills
When I was young, my family took a lot of summer road trips.
Initially we’d go in a sedan, then later a station wagon, and later, when drawing virtual lines in the middle of the back seat no longer worked, my family upgraded to a van that often pulled a pop-up camper and eventually an RV.
Because my dad always drove, I would beg to trade seats with my mom so I could sit up front. It was a combination of back-seat motion sickness and wanting to be nearer the air conditioner vents (and my dad) that led to my assignment as the “family navigator” for most of those trips across the vast expanse of the U.S. from the Texas coast.
My dad had been an Eagle Scout. I often bragged that he knew directions better than most eagles themselves. Regardless, he pretended to need me to study the maps that were stuck in the car door pockets (along with some candy, random books, Archie cartoons and a deck of playing cards.)
He’d tell me our current location and ask me to identify the route to the next major stop. We’d aim for 3 or 4 hours down the road to fill up with gas, take bathroom breaks and complain about how hot it was.
We traveled to the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas and Missouri where s’mores were a food group while camping along the gushing rivers. We visited the towering spires of the Badlands and I first saw snow in the South Dakota Black Hills. Our stop at the Oglala Lakota warrior Crazy Horse monument brought tears to my dad’s eyes while Mt. Rushmore seemed contrived.
I remember the limestone-filled turquoise Bear Lake in Idaho, and the multitude of hydrothermal geysers and the enormity of the grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park. We danced to the jazz bands and marveled at the 24-mile Lake Pontchartrain bridge in the loud and sticky New Orleans.
Every few years we’d escape the Texas heat and camp in various mountain ranges in Colorado, which eventually would become my home, more than once.
We made many other forays across the U.S. of A, driving thousands of miles peering out the windows into the vast expanse of interstate and back roads. Later I would read the book Blue Highways and realize how lucky I’d been for having circumnavigated my childhood behind the windshield of an American car with map in hand.
At my dad’s command, I’d plot the course across states from city to town to national park and back, knowing that he’d already studied the route. No matter how lost I felt in the remaining context of my life, thanks to my dad’s prodding, I knew if I had a map I could find my way.
Map-Reading Skills No Longer Apply
Our world has changed significantly since we used maps to maneuver life’s terrain. In fact, almost none of the rules that we learned in the last several hundred years apply to the landscape of our lives now.
Which is part of what causes us to feel lost. Disoriented. And filled with fear about how to find our way into the future.
Cartographers have done a better job plotting the topography of the lunar landscape than we have a schema for our dubious journey ahead.
Responding to Crisis with Fear
The only certainty we have now is that our world is in constant flux — economic instability, multiple overlapping crises, declining states of mental health and well-being, and political chaos are the new norms.
Life has become a whirlwind, and for many, it feels like we’re on the edge of madness.
Many of us have a greater distrust in institutions and systems, yet we’re surrounded by a disconcerting cacophony of voices, with no clear destination in mind or agreement about who should be plotting the course.
To those on the front lines of the global climate or economic disasters, their world is spiraling into chaos, foundations are disintegrating, and their faith is evaporating.
To the many whose lives haven’t yet been touched, there’s a deep fear that there are no true guides — so we’ll just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.
False Security of the Old Ways
And yet, despite our need to respond to the current landscape with new strategies or solutions, we’re still pulling maps out of the glove box because it’s what we know.
Everything we thought was dependable is proving unreliable. We don’t know where to turn; there are no clear role models, only a maelstrom of voices barking competing or confusing directions.
And mostly this is happening because our current conceptions of reality are flawed. We still believe in a static world in which we can “figure” ourselves out of dilemmas.
This strategic thinking- problem-solution orientation won’t work because the world is shifting faster than we can make sense of it.
We can’t solve problems that shift in front of us. Our minds and hearts can’t grasp the perplexing and obscure fluidity of the world as it is evolving now.
Never Better than Now
Yet there has never been a better time to learn new navigational skills, both inner and outer.
Just as the maps changed when we learned the world wasn’t flat, we’re recreating a sense of how the world really works as our quantum and cosmic awareness shifts the limited conceptions of space-time reality and linear-mechanistic models.
Old and mechanistic institutions are in the beginning phases of being reformed or dismantled. Continually expanding consciousness heightens awareness of how we create our reality. We have accelerating access to personal and spiritual resources to stretch our identities and become a new version of ourselves, and incentives to explore regions of our lives never before imagined.
The recognition of the immense polycrisis requires us to engage in a new way with each other and our world. Despite the traditional focus of our developed world to compete and conspire to win, we are more engaged and activated to ask “what is ours to do” than ever before, knowing that it must be done together.
We have an increased awareness that we are both the problem and the solution. Who we are, and how we choose to travel this world, is mirrored in our external environment.
Our Greatest Hope
Our greatest hope is that we can become nimble, agile, responsive yet grounded, centered and rooted humans that can drive in uncharted territory.
These next-level capacities can help us navigate the outrageous and incomprehensible complexity that is and will continue to exist around us. At least in the foreseeable future.
To navigate our way into the future, we need to be
- Nimble yet centered
- Agile yet rooted
- Flexible yet present
And we need to transform old ways into new possibilities:
- Fixed sense of self to evolving identity
- Simple perspective-taking to interconnected consciousness
- Historical frame to futuristic focus
- Fear of the unknown to relishing uncertainty
- Problem-solution frame to possibility mindset
- Strategic thinking to emergent being
- Independent trauma to interdependent narrative
- Individualistic orientation to co-creative beings
And, because the world is as we are, until we resolve our inner conflict, individually and collectively, the world will mirror our inner worlds- the incomplete, partial and fractured selves that we are.
Navigational Tools 101: Inner Wholeness
As we continue to recognize that this work must be done now, we will begin to embrace that we are each individually and collectively responsible for pointing our compass to the future.
If we respond adequately now to the uncertainty, learning the tools and skills we need to navigate the unknown, collectively we may avoid an impending doom.
The greatest chance we have to avoid this unfortunate scenario is to start within.
Healing ourselves, resolving the fractured psyches of our eternal souls to create alignment with the deepest essence of our being, and learning to live from the core of who we are, will create coherence within ourselves and with each other and the planet.
Until then, the world we live in will continue to resonate with our exact frequency, matching the collective trauma of our species and creating the broken landscapes we’ll be forced to traverse.
About the Author
I’m the Author of the bestseller, The Golden Thread: Where to Find Purpose in the Stages of Your Life. Download this free audio course to learn about your own Golden Thread of purpose.
I’ve spent my life imagining a world where we could all become who we’re meant to be, awake and alive in a way that allows us to express our most innate, natural and purposeful gifts.
I believe the bridge to our future exists in becoming rooted in our purpose, and more prepared for the unknown. Download the Navigate Our Wild Future Playbook to gain tools to help you prepare.
And very soon we’re unleashing an immersive and experiential initiative called Sacred Human Expedition, designed to help us all learn to navigate from love, not fear, and become the audacious and inspired Creators the world needs now.
Stay tuned or contact me to learn more.
Explore at Emergence Institute.
