Wrong Map

I started reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" the other day, something I've put off for 20-ish years, and found something interesting.  Lately, I've become very frustrated with aspects of my Life, but I couldn't come up with a "Why".  The more I ventured out, the more I saw what was wrong with The World, so the more I wanted to stay inside and avoid it.  But within the first few chapters of the book, the author talked about inward vs outward focus, which caused me to change the way I see the world - I realized that I had the wrong map!  And all it took was someone outside of me to tell me that!

As I am fond of thinking of saying, "The map is not the territory."  I would look around me all day long and ask myself "Why?", though usually with more exclamation points.  "Why did that person cut me off on the highway, couldn't they see that if they made some minor change, all of us could have gotten to our destinations faster?"  "Why did that person just do X, when clearly doing Y would have helped not only themselves, but everyone else involved?", would be a good summary.  Why, why, why - that was my day.  I wasn't get any answers, and it was getting very frustrating, because I love answers.  I mean, who doesn't?  Answers tell us everything!

After reading the part of the book I've read so far, I understood the source of my frustration - the wrong map.  In my mind, I had a Perfect Map.  If everyone behaved logically and for the best interest of all involved, things would go this way or that, but things didn't go that way.  As perfect as I thought my map was, it didn't show me reality, only what I wanted reality to be - my perfect version of it.  Kind of the point of this blog - things I do not understand about the world around me, because I couldn't match it to a place on my map.  My map was like an RPG vs real life - very clean and pristine vs dirty and ugly, kind of how I view The World vs the world.

When driving down the streets to "work", I used to notice all of the idiotic maneuvers of cars around me, because my map had these events highlighted as Points of Interest.  People who were rude to me, people who cut me off in line, the power going out in my house, my furnace not work - all of these things were labelled on my map as "Come See the Exciting Roadside Dinner - everything you want to see is right here!  Now with Extra Gravy!"

So, now I see The World differently!  I realize that there are two ways to go from here:  1) change my map to better match reality, or 2) get a bulldozer and take reality to task, remold the world to be what my map says it should be.  All of these choices that I suddenly have!

So far, I've been trying out step one - removing things from my map, change it to better match my surroundings, etc, and it has been working.  I can drive to work and still be happy.  The question is, will I continue down this path, or try out path two - I do love a good experiment...

The Edward