When Ghosts Are Guides
Navigating the Unknown: the fifth thresholding skill
I often talk about the fifth Thresholding skill named in my book – Navigating the Unknown – with metaphors about moving into terrain never visited before. Terra incognita. Or encountering the unknown without guidance of maps or compass.
I still find that to be helpful. But recently, I’ve also been thinking about what happens when you visit a place long familiar that is now beyond recognition. I’ve noticed the unique disorientation that comes when you find yourself somewhere you’ve been many times before, but it’s different now. The roads have been rerouted. Buildings have been torn down or constructed. Maybe a new high rise obscures a long-cherished view, or a shoreline moves farther out to sea. Or maybe it’s you that’s changed, and entrances you’ve used your whole life are no longer accessible to your wheelchair or walker, or your faltering memory veils what you once knew by heart and you feel like a visitor in your own home town.
The unfamiliarity can dislodge not only our sense of direction
but also our orientation in time, our memories and emotions, even our identity.
Sometimes we are immediately aware of what has changed. Other times, without naming it, we experience a disquieting strangeness when we expected to know our way but don’t. The unfamiliarity can dislodge not only our sense of direction but also our orientation in time, our memories and emotions, even our identity.
It happens in many ways – human made or natural events. Have you ever visited the path a tornado has flattened through a forest you knew well? Sunlight falls on ground shaded for decades. Birdsong is silenced. Wind moves newly uninhibited. When loggers clear cut virgin forests in Wisconsin where I grew up, they sometimes left a single tree standing as a “landmark tree” for future navigation, but the emptiness around that single tree can be as thick an absence as the forest was in its presence.
How do we find our way through absences like this when landmarks disappear?
Navigating in Nicaragua has long depended upon landmarks, often requiring a dual knowledge of both place and time. Some streets are not named. Many buildings and houses have no number. Typically, addresses are given by landmarks – a church, a tall tree, a red house – and the number of blocks your destination is from those landmarks. Instead of east, west, north or south, directions might be poetically indicated by arriba or abajo, meaning up or down, indicating the location of the sunrise (up) or sunset (down) or al lago, meaning the direction in which a nearby lake can be found.
What adds confusion is when the red house is painted yellow or the tree has toppled and the directions stay the same, now based on landmark ghosts. To get to where you’re going, you have to either know the history of the place and its landmarks, or be willing to ask. Was there once a red house on this street? A big tree? A church? Where?
On our shared thresholds today, I’ve been noticing changes in landmarks, both in space and time. Not long ago in the United States, we considered elections to have clear outcomes and expected the transfer of power after elections to be ceremonial and uncontested. Now these landmarks in time have lost some certainty as we have experienced them differently. We approach them less as givens and more as something to be tended carefully for the sake of both the past and the future. In the natural world, seasonal weather patterns are shifting, as are planting zones, migrations and whole ecosystems. Water levels are rising and falling. In our cities, monuments to oppressive history are coming down. Sometimes new ones rise in their place. Sometimes empty space is left to speak its own truth.
How will we navigate these and other changes in the landscape of time and place? How will we explore and inhabit the corresponding shifts in our own understandings, memories and identities? With so much changing, by what coordinates can we determine where we are and where we hope to go, and who we are and who we are becoming?
I garner wisdom from Carl Jung and contemporary Jungian analyst James Hollis, who both note that much of our human struggle and confusion – one could say lack of direction – in the face of change and challenge stems from maintaining too narrow a view. We think in terms of opposites – what’s here and what’s gone, what’s right and what’s wrong, who belongs and who doesn’t, who we once were and who we are now. Jung suggested that we expand beyond either/or thinking, making room for the tension between opposites and holding that tension long enough for a third option to arise.
When navigating the unknown, can we remember what was while noticing what is now? Can we make room for the tension between these as change occurs? Can we regard our world and our lives capaciously enough to imagine and invite what might yet be?
You won’t find that kind of navigation in Google Maps. Or as an individual. This expansive awareness requires different perspectives; it benefits from asking questions and holding them open for a while. Pausing and making room for memory and imagination to meet in the here and now. Then, as the poets do, lifting our eyes to a wider horizon. In other words, situating ourselves in a bigger context, a more encompassing worldview, a deeper faith, a universe expanding across time and space, a longer arc that bends toward justice.
How do you navigate the unknowns in your life? What helps you hold past and present together in the midst of change, while still making room for an uncertain future? How do you expand your mindset to encourage more than either/or thinking? What do you claim as navigational coordinates and what practices help you to find them?
I look forward to hearing your navigational wisdom in these uncertain times. What guides you into the unknowns of a changing world?
Karen