Reshaping our maps to the territory

In my life, I have often tried to orient myself to decisions in front of me by looking ahead.

In my twenties, I spent time with people in their thirties, asking about work, purpose, and how they were shaping their lives - what mattered, what endured, what they wished they had known. Many of their reflections pointed to a shift: from choosing things for status to a deeper understanding of what actually suited them and the life they wanted to live.

In my thirties, I turned to those in their forties and fifties. There, I heard stories of accolades and achievements that, over time, felt empty beside relationships that could not be replaced. Again and again, I heard some version of the same truth: that time with those you love cannot be deferred, and what is neglected there carries a cost that is difficult to repair later.

Now, in my fifties, my conversations have shifted again. With people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, the focus turns toward health, care, and both the cultivation of discipline and curiosity required in sustaining a life over time.

Over the years I have learnt that these conversations have given me a sense of the landscape but not a map. Because no matter how much I try to prepare, I cannot fully know my journey in these phases until I am inside them. Each threshold brings something that cannot be understood in advance, only lived into.

While much of what we’ve been taught suggests that life unfolds in a sequence - that we move from one stage to the next, building clarity as we go. In lived experience that linearity rarely holds. What becomes visible instead is a different kind of movement: cyclical, layered, and often contradictory.

We find ourselves beginning and ending things at the same time. Moving forward in one area of life while something else is quietly falling away. Returning to familiar questions, but from a different place.

Maps can orient us. They offer patterns, language, and a way of making sense of change. But they are always partial and in periods of real transformation, personally and collectively, the territory begins to shift and the maps that once guided us stop working. They no longer align with what is actually unfolding. At that point, orientation requires something else. Not a better map, at least not immediately, but a deeper capacity to read the terrain and an opening to a new way of making sense of it.

One of the ways we can begin to do this is by paying attention to the seasons: not as a neat progression, but as an ecological pattern that reveals the nature of the change we are in.

In the natural world, seasons are not goals to be achieved. They are conditions to be lived within. Each carries its own rhythm, its own demands, and its own form of intelligence. There are times of emergence, where something new is just beginning to take hold. Times of fullness, where energy is outward, visible, and generative. Times of release, where something is being asked to end, whether we are ready or not. And times of dormancy, where little appears to be happening, yet something essential is reorganizing beneath the surface.

To work with seasons in this way is not about predicting what will happen next. It is about learning to recognize what kind of weather we are in and what that weather asks of us.

Layered into the cycles of days and seasons is how we, as adults, change the way we make sense of things.  The work of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey in developmental psychology, helps us track adulthood not as a fixed state but a slower moving current of inner change. Our capacity to make meaning continues to evolve: not just through accumulation, but through transforming our axis mundi. Many adults operate within what they describe as the socialized mind, where identity is shaped largely by external expectations, what we have learned to value, the need for belonging, and the norms of the environments we inhabit.

At certain points, this way of organizing our experience begins to strain. The world becomes more complex than the frameworks we rely on. Tensions emerge or life events push us towards conundrums that cannot be resolved within our existing structures. This often marks a developmental  threshold.

Some people begin to shift towards what Kegan and Lahey call the self-authoring mind: the capacity to step back from external expectations and orient from an internally defined set of values. This is a significant shift: from being shaped by the world around us to developing an inner compass.

And yet, even this is not stable ground forever.

Over time, that internally constructed identity can begin to feel insufficient. The world continues to change, and we have experiences that do not fit neatly within our own framework. For some, this opens the possibility of a further shift, toward a more fluid way of holding identity, one that moves between multiple perspectives without needing to resolve them into a single, fixed position.

These developmental movements are not linear or predictable. They unfold over years, often through periods of confusion, frustration, or loss. The way we have been making sense of things stops working, but a new way has not yet fully formed. Again, we find ourselves in a kind of season.

Wisdom traditions have long described similar arcs, though in different languages. These languages are often discovered and defined through a variety of somatic practices such as meditation, whirling dirvish, contemplative prayer,  pranayama, speaking in tongues or plant medicine ceremonies. Inviting in altered states of consciousness and a conscious relationship with the mysterious part of life and ourselves that lives beyond ourselves.  

The wisdom traditions, that form part of religions across the world, speak of stages of life that involve not just growth, but reorientation and moving from dependence on external authority, to the formation of an inner knowing, and eventually toward a deeper attunement to something that cannot be fully controlled or defined. At that point, the task is no longer simply to assert our own direction; it is to listen more carefully to movement and to sense what is emerging. Our task becomes reading the subtle shifts in ourselves and our environment and moving with these subtleties even before making sense of them, interpreting or ordering them. Our questions center more on what  they ask of us, rather than imposing what we think should happen.

This is where the play between map and territory becomes most alive. The more we move into this type of transformation, the less any fixed map can fully orient us. Instead, we begin to rely on something more subtle: an ongoing dialogue between our inner sense of direction and the reality of what is unfolding around us.

This dynamic is not only individual. We are living through collective thresholds as well.

With global media it is hard to miss that across societies and cultures, many of the maps that have guided us - social norms, institutional structures, and shared narratives - are no longer working. It is confusing and creates tension. Some respond by trying to reinforce the old maps, doubling down on certainty. Others move quickly to create new ones, often before the territory is fully understood. But both responses can miss something essential. The quick defense or interpretation looks from a distance more like a nervous twitch in response to the unknown territory a deeper transformation is asking us to enter. The noise and the panic when our definitions lose efficacy, can stop us really listening to the conditions and asking deeper questions to understand how we are shifting. We can observe where we avoid complexity especially when it exceeds the frameworks we have relied on. Not on a superficial level but in the way we foundational orientate to each other and our environment. The work then, is not simply to replace one map with another or to argue which one is right. The work is to deepen our collective capacity to read the terrain together without a map.

To notice what is actually happening beneath the surface. To include multiple perspectives, even when they are uncomfortable and contradictory. To not just tolerate the ambiguity that comes with not yet knowing but to welcome it in.

This requires the discipline of  practicing where we individually and collectively put our attention. Not as a competition of which way is right but finding ongoing ways of engaging with each other and with the change we are in.

Here we can learn from land based cultures whose survival depended on their capacity to listen collectively to the subtle changes in their environment and make sense of them. Land based cultures that often in the West have been ignored, disrespected or even decimated.  These cultures become sources of wisdom and inspiration,  living knowledge that we can learn from. Not to be revered or reframed or stolen as the right answer but as a way of working with each other in rebalancing our approach to the ways we listen to our environment and make meaning of what we o serve.

The collective practice in times of change could be to find ways to remain in connection even when clarity is partial and outcomes are uncertain. To develop the capacity to hone our recognition of the more subtle complexities in changing seasons, individually and collectively. To sense when something is ending, even if we would prefer it not to. To notice when something new is emerging, even if it is not yet clear. To act when the moment calls for action, and to wait when it does not. And in society to find ways that help us balance communion with agency.

The new maps, in this sense, may  not be fixed. They may be shaped through our navigation of the territory over time.

Individually, this would mean learning to trust our own capacity to orient - not by forcing clarity, but by listening more deeply. Collectively, it would mean putting our energy and resources towards creating the conditions where we can make sense of what is happening together, rather than defaulting to premature certainty or fragmentation.

In my work with Open Circle over the years, I have observed that as we make sense of things together, we learn how to live in uncertainty and the way forward takes shape in the ongoing relationship between us. Less as a vision held by a leader at the front and more as a collective movement with the spirit and hope of that movement at the centre.

With the hope that as communities continue to practice listening together, they develop the muscles to create the change they want to see in the world through the revelatory moments between them and the ripples that makes.

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