As we move into winter in this “Pandemic now”, a key focus for us (and in my writing) is on “Proactive Resilience“. Some thoughts today to support each of us with our resilience.
I have been musing recently in my daily posts around layers of context and language. This also brought to mind the term “The Map is not the Territory“, as I wrote about in this post from 2019 which itself links to a fantastic longer post from Farnam Street.
One way I link this to proactive resilience is for us to see the world, not representations of it. When I go for a walk this Autumn, I see the trees, the leaves, I marvel at the colours. When I went for a walking meeting amongst autumn colours last week with someone I hadn’t seen in person since before lockdown in March, I was present to them, to that moment.
Alan Watts was a master of presence and giving us new and varied ways to anchor to the present. He was also very fond of a phrase similar in meaning to “the map is not the territory”, he said: “the menu is not the meal“.
I share with you this passage, then a short youtube clip of his wondrous voice saying the words), expressing things so much better than I could:
..now when I use the word thinking I mean precisely that process translating what is going on in nature into words, symbols
or numbers.Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money bears to wealth. You cannot quench anybody’s thirst with the word water just as you cannot eat a dollar bill and derive nutrition, but using symbols and using conscious intelligence has proved very useful to us. It has given us such technology as we have, but at the same time, it has proved too much of a good thing.
At the same time, we’ve become so fascinated with it that we confuse the
world as it is with the world as it is thought about, talked about and figured about, that is to say with the world as it is described. and the difference between these two is vast, and when we are not aware of ourselves except in a symbolic way, we’re not related to ourselves at all.We’re like people eating menus instead of dinners and that’s why we all feel psychologically frustrated.
Alan Watts