Issue #2 
The Maps We Carry

The Maps We Carry

​

I arrived in the early 1970s and grew into the 80s — a time of disco balls, hairbands, and shuffle skating in dark rinks. We played outside: tree houses, bikes, football in the street. ‘Technology’ meant Space Invaders at Pizza Hut or Asteroids on the Atari. Social media was a kitchen-wall phone. Influence came face-to-face.

​

In school and around the neighborhood, we kids influenced each other with the quiet understanding that our parents’ rules ruled our lives. It was their stories we listened to most, and whether we accepted or resisted them, they shaped our early sense of the world. School played its part too — through the novels and textbooks we were asked to read and be tested on.

 

The map I didn't know I was following

​

As I continued to grow, the stories I adopted became more like maps — quiet frames that shaped how I saw life and my place within it. They told me how I was supposed to be, what I was meant to become, and how to understand my relationships with myself, others, and the world around me.

​

I didn’t think of them as maps at the time; in fact, I didn’t think of them at all. They simply reflected what I was seeing around me — the social, economic, and governance structures laid out long before I arrived. This was, the message said, how we could and must live and think. There was no alternative.

​

So I followed the map to a ‘T’. The education system led me along its paths — not built for awareness of self and others, but for competence in the ways of being that served the systems of production and profit we’d inherited. In our “civilized” society, life became a series of hoops to jump through, often called “standards.” They were designed to produce capable workers and compliant citizens — not free or aware beings. Functioning, not thriving. It wasn’t the fault of the system or its creators, it was simply how it was structured to perform.

​

For example, at one point in the US, the motto for education became explicitly implicit: “No Child Left Behind” was implemented as “teach them to pass the tests, ensure that no one fails or falls behind.”  The intention was good, but the end result is that students may have gained the right pieces of knowledge to pass the test, but never truly learned anything else or understood what they should have.
 

Cracks in the map

​

As I walked through time, map in hand, small seeds of awareness began to sprout. My mother’s efforts to fight illegal development on Florida’s wetlands made it clear - the incoherence I was starting to feel was real. Still, I kept walking the same path.

​

From the US to Europe to Asia. Accounting. Law. Admired professions, yet purposed to sustain the very systems in which I was sensing something off. In professional practice, I learned how those systems operated intimately both in their role in society as well as in their practice — how they consistently sacrificed responsibility for the sake of profit, while rewarding a practice ethos of sleeplessness, supine compliance, and sedation, and punishing balance and truth. For someone hoping to make sense of life, these experiences stood out as learning opportunities but not resonant with my core values. The map told me to go straight; I took a sharp left.

​

Searching for presence

​

With the invisible map unknowingly still in my hands, I was unsure where to go. I began working more with people and less with spreadsheets. I traveled the world, competed in endurance races, taught law at university and leadership skills in boardrooms  — searching for answers to questions I couldn’t yet articulate while observing the entire system.

Then one Christmas I climbed aboard my motorcycle and rode from Singapore to Thailand, stumbling into a small mountain retreat outside Hat Yai — a space centered on presence, critical thinking, and creativity inspired by Jiddu Krishnamurti. The clouds in my vision began to clear. I began to see that truth was not in the answers but in the questions — not in discovery, but in the stripping away of illusion - the map I was still holding.

​

“Truth is a pathless land.”

​

I could now see the map - it was filled with paths that the system was calling “truth.”  Yet now it was clear that the map did not reflect the terrain.

​

Off the map

​

Years later, while working with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, I learned more about systems dynamics and the limits of our planetary systems. Meadows’ Limits to Growth revealed how far off our maps were from the reality, showing their model’s dynamic of industrial society’s rise and collapse in the face of planetary limitations - and yet industry and government leaders dismissed those prophetic warnings. 

​

Soon after, I pursued postgraduate work at the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability, studied systems thinking and complexity science, and joined the Society for Organizational Learning. The path I was then walking was well off the map I’d inherited, and I wondered whether it was possible to operate without one entirely. 

​

Stepping with a compass

​

Increasingly, I was re-tuning from maps and mental models to coherence — a felt sense of alignment with life’s deeper systems, of connection and vitality that words couldn’t yet name and that modernity had no map for. The models that would become The Life Framework were already forming within me.

My closest friend had repeatedly told me over the years, “You step to the beat of your own drum,” but as I’ve disengaged from the mechanisms of modern society over these past years, it felt like I was connecting with something much deeper than my own rhythm:

​

 

Truth
 

Connection
 

Freedom
 

Adventure

​

​​

​

​​These four ways of being in the world became the four Orientations for Coherence that anchor The Living Compass - a model supporting presence in each moment. They are the disruptors of the incoherent maps that often rule our emotions and behavior.

​

In time the larger framing of life became more clear: Existence and Awareness. This is movement and relationship animated by awareness and presence. That became The Life Model, which provides a language to understand life, not just know it through dissection and reduction.

​

I began to bring pieces of these developing models together in the Ecology of Coherence synthesizing them into a rich configuration of consciousness, knowing, coherence and consequence.  

​

​​​​​​These models and others grew organically through lived experience and inquiry, helping me not only recognize the map I’d been carrying, but to disrupt it, to see beyond it — to what life now requires of us in a world that’s shifting beneath our feet. When the map we’ve been carrying is not just incoherent, but destructive.

​

These maps may feel internally coherent — tidy, logical, and reinforced by the systems around us — yet are fundamentally misaligned with life and thus incoherent. They may feel like the only reality possible — but they are simply maps that society created in accordance with its own systems' structures. They don’t meet our real needs; they meet the conditioned wants we’ve inherited. They give direction, not orientation. They reward performance, not presence. Indigenous cultures show us the contrast clearly: coherence with the land was always possible. Our maps simply exclude it.

​

The Life Framework, the integration of these models and others, is a multi-layered response to questions of being, knowing, and navigating daily life in the face of these maps. It helped me see that many of our inherited maps of systems were built for prediction, production, and control. But when held up against the complex terrain of relationship, ecology, presence, and consequence, they fall apart. 

​

Choosing the path ahead

​

Most of us grew up unwittingly following these maps. The times we’re in now are asking for a different kind of intelligence than the ones that wrote and sustained these maps. One that can listen, sense, and adapt in real time. One that orients: around the realities of our situation, within the relationships we inhabit, across the capacity to be, think and do as we choose, and through the strength and courage to put down the maps we have been carrying and step into the unknown together. Truth, Connection, Freedom, Adventure.

​

Perhaps instead of a map, we carry a compass — so we can first find ourselves.

The new maps will draw themselves as we walk with coherence.

What maps are you carrying with you?