We don’t have a dot on this map

Ya know how exciting it is to be going someplace? (You know, back when we got to go places.) You’d put that dot on a map – used to be with a pencil, but now we “drop a pin” on a digital map – and, there! There is where we’re going. And look at all that area in between! “Oh, the places you’ll go!”

Are you old enough to remember those Triple-A “TripTiks”? Gawd that was exciting. Weeks before your planned road trip you’d call AAA, tell ‘em where you were headed (maybe multiple destinations), and a few days later in the mail you’d get a heavy envelope with “Tour Books” for the states you’d be driving through, showing places of interest plus hotels and motels with their prices and stars. The Holiday Inns were usually $12 – $14 (“3.5 stars”), with the Best Westerns and Howard Johnsons often $2 less. Of course, a pool was required, and if it should have a slide into the pool, well look no further!

Along with the Tour Books would come the TripTik, a tall-format (maybe four inches wide by eight inches high) set of maps gathered with a white plastic coil at the top, complete with a page with a blank spreadsheet for you to track, with a pen or pencil, your daily miles and gas and other expenditures. (Which you would do dutifully for about a day and a half and then blow that off, because hey, we’re on vacation.) Each exciting page of the TripTik offered detailed maps of successive segments of 100 or so miles and included a little “call out” describing this area: “Rolling hills through mostly farmland. Watch for deer.” Ooh, I might see a deer along this stretch?! No napping here!

I think AAA still offers hard-copy and digital TripTiks, but these days it is easier to get all this information, and so much more, via Google. Maybe “Send to phone” the Google map, with all the placed pins and associated directions. And, oh, the excitement builds!

And then, when you get to your destination . . . where shall we eat? If some friend or other reliable resource has said, “Oh, if you’re going to that city you HAVE TO eat at X,” well then, isn’t that great?! You have a goal, rather than just splaying open the phone book (ok, Google) and struggling to agree on a place.

And so this is a theme for me: Constraints can be freeing. It is good to have that dot on the map. You rarely just hop in the car and start driving – you’re headed to that pin. And then we don’t just Google “restaurants near me,” we look for that place that came well recommended. This frees us up to just go rather than wonder and wander. Constraints. Yay.

If someone says “Write a poem,” you sit there looking at a blank screen or blank piece of paper. But if someone says “Write a poem on aardvarks,” well, you’re off and running. What rhymes with “aardvark?” These ant-eating beasts are quite straightforward, there’s very little snark.

Consider parenting young kids. When we were young parents we’d sometimes think we were showing our 4-year-old and our 8-year-old respect by asking “Well, what do you think? What should we do?” And in small measure that was valuable, but sometimes we’d find ourselves twisting out of control until one of us adults finally put the valuable constraints on the situation – “OK, you sit there, you sit there, everyone be quiet for a minute. Then this is what we’re gonna do.” And everyone, and the situation, would calm down.

But what about life? And, to the point, death? We don’t have that dot on our map. And this, to me, feels burdensome. I have heard smart people preach on the joy of death — of, in particular, an unknown death. It made great sense at the time, but I can’t recapture the thought, now.

Some people – whom we would count as unfortunate – DO have a dot placed on their map for them, by doctors or maybe by hospice nurses. But that is less of a dot and more of a line segment – “Given his scores, I’d say he has two to four months.” And even that line segment is often just an informed guess, as captured so poetically by Jason Isbell in his song, “Speed trap town”: “Doctors said daddy wouldn’t make it a year, but the holidays are over and he’s still here.”

(Although maybe sometimes that line segment can be closer to a dot. The old, irreverent magazine, National Lampoon, in their “Boredom” issue, ran a contest to “Guess when Mamie Eisenhower is going to die.” I guess Ike’s wife wasn’t seen to be as interesting as Dr. Biden or Mrs. Trump. In subsequent issues they’d offer, in the margins, little pictures of Mamie, waving, supposedly saying “I’m still here.” Many months later, after she had died, they announced that the winning entry had been “submitted by Mrs. Eisenhower’s nurse. Her winning entry was ‘In about five minutes.’”)

But most of us don’t have that dot. I just turned 70. (Thus explaining this pensiveness.) The actuarial tables say I’m “expected” to live to age 85.3. Let’s just for argument’s sake assume that my obesity is counterbalanced by my absence of any known major issues plus the excellence of my health insurance and my healthcare providers. So, that’s just under 184 months. But if we “dropped a pin” on May 10, 2037, that would obviously be folly. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. (Unlikely, given that the bus would have to crash through our house since I never go anywhere.) Or I could die in any of a thousand other ways that I shan’t list here, though I assure you I have considered in detail.

The much-beloved Vietnamese Buddhist monk and Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, died recently at the age of 95. He wrote and spoke much of mindfulness, compassion, and nonviolence. One of his many quotable quotes is: “It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have.” Reading Thich Nhat Hanh, one comes quickly to the conclusion that he worried very little about pins in maps.

His “Walking Meditation Poem” begins this way:
“Take my hand.
We will walk.
We will only walk.
We will enjoy our walk
without thinking of arriving anywhere.”

Are we there yet?