Say you’re walking through Death Valley, trying to find your way back to the highway. Luckily you’ve got a good paper map.
As you walk, you scan the territory around you for landmarks. You see some large-scale details: hills, rock formations, and gullies. Also some minute ones: pebbles, gangly plants, trails through the dust where snakes have been.
These smaller details would never appear on a map, because they’re not conducive to navigation, yet they are certainly part of the territory, as are lizards, birds, forgotten stone arrowheads, the bleached bones of cattle, and the fossils of Mesozoic squid.
At least right now, you too are a part of the territory, along with your clothing and boots, canteen, Tilley hat, and California highways department map of Death Valley.
When you look at a map, it appears at a glance that the territory is inside the map. This map contains the whole of Death Valley National Park — every stretch of its highways, every point of interest, both gas stations, and a handful of residential hamlets. You hold the whole expanse in your hands. You’re in there somewhere, presumably south of the line that says Highway 190.
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
The ice cream example made me laugh. Even getting exactly what we wanted can turn straight into reaching for the next spoonful. Using just one inbreath as the starting point makes this feel much more approachable than setting out to “be still for twenty minutes”.