where are we? and where do we want to go?

 

us within space

spatial intelligence--

a way to describe one of the many lenses

through which the brain and the heart

can perceive and act upon the world:

where are we?

where are we as a part of where everything else is?

and how are we connected to the rest?

the concept of this lens provides a context

within which we can understand

how we move through the world, or not,

a skill our GPS machines are taking away from us,

at least in terms of literal movement on roads,

for it is beguilingly easy to have satellites and electronics

pinpoint where we are on a map,

where we want to go,

and the relationship of the two,

the routes that can get us there

and even commentary as to traffic and timing,

but they don't help us to get up in time 

to meet friends who await us,

what is our relationship to the Divine?

such self-knowledge of place and connection,

of the personal to the larger, can be vital

to our understanding of our place in the universe,

too many people seek to be like the GPS,

they tell us who we are and how we should be

in relationship to the whole,

by following their lead we can lose ourselves,

and the lost do not inherit the earth,

I also wonder about family,

how much who we are is influenced through relationship,

to siblings, to parents, to aunts and uncles,

maybe to grandparents,

maybe to the legacy of history,

maybe to the potential of the future,

to a partner,

to ourselves?

I talk to a former student who is the youngest in her family,

the third daughter just as my wife was also third and youngest,

much as I was the third son, youngest, too,

we were each burdened and blessed by our place

and its relationship to siblings and parents,

it is fascinating to question how 

it all affected the rules of the game

within which we played,

there is a fullness to who my former student is

and to how she surely acts upon the world,

I wonder how much she is faking it,

feeling the imperative of the need to act, and doing so,

I wonder how much she does so despite self-doubt,

and does her place in the family influence her actions at all?

the experiment of each life is tainted by variables

that can overwhelm the clarity of a surely-controlled reality,

there is still cause-and-effect,

but the variables add so much chance

 that we have to gamble

that we get enough right 

as to where we are and where we want to go,

that there is a rightness to our movement.

by Henry H. Walker

June 15, ‘26