Looking back, as if all the traits were heritable and therefore traceable. But nothing is so mappable.
We contain a bundle of qualities that shift with time. As life goes on, what’s inherited yields to different flavors of personality. As Henry James put it, “Nothing is my last word on anything.”
A new challenge is always lurking, presenting another opportunity to make us feel lost. Thankfully, interior navigation knows best how to deal with the labyrinth of life.
If we refuse to adapt or become too lazy, we die. Indifference to learning kills the educated man.
“The map is not the territory,” Alfred Korzybski once remarked. The mental model is the ultimate purveyor of fiction, often confused with reality itself.
All it takes is a slight paper tear to nix the whole idea of geographic concreteness. Yet, most people remain transfixed on static, for nothing appears real until it appears on television anyway.