I Stopped Mapping

I stopped mapping my life when I was thirty-four. Not maps in the literal sense, though I was a cartographer for eleven years, which is part of the story. I mean the other kind of mapping — the one where you plot where you should be by a certain age, draw lines between milestones, and measure the distance between where you are and where the plan said you'd be. The plan said I'd be married by twenty-eight. Project manager by thirty. House by thirty-two. The plan was detailed. I'd drawn it in my head with the same precision I brought to topographic surveys, and it was about as useful as a map of a country that doesn't exist. I was a good cartographer. This is not false modesty or a setup for a joke. I made maps for a geological survey company in Wellington, and the work suited me because it was about accuracy — taking the messy, irregular shape of the actual ground and translating it into something clean and readable. Contour lines. Grid references. The satisfying fiction that the world can be flattened into two dimensions without losing anything important. You lose plenty, of course. Every map is a decision about what to leave out. Rivers make the cut. The sound a river makes does not. A mountain gets a height marker and a name. The fact that it looks different in October than in March — that the light changes the whole shape of it — doesn't fit on the page. I left the survey job for reasons that seemed dramatic at the time and are boring now. I moved to Melbourne. I worked in a print shop for a year, then a bookshop, then a place that sold camping equipment where I was overqualified for everything except folding tents, which I was terrible at. Somewhere in there I stopped planning. Not deliberately. It wasn't a decision. I just noticed one morning that I'd stopped checking my position against the route I'd drawn, because the route had stopped making sense. I was in a city I hadn't planned on, doing work that wasn't on any map I'd made, and the strange thing was: I was fine. Not ecstatic. Not transformed. Fine, in the genuine sense of the word, which is underrated. I'm forty-one now. I work for a small publisher that makes nature guides. I walk to work along the Yarra and I don't measure the distance. I live in a flat that I rent and will probably always rent and the plan, if I had one, would have called this a failure, and the plan would have been wrong. The best maps I ever made were of places I'd actually walked through. Not surveyed from a distance. Walked. When you've been on the ground, you know which details matter and which are just data. The contour lines mean something because you remember the hill. I don't make maps anymore. But I walk a lot. I notice the ground.