by Jess Evans
May 8, 2018
Your mind is a very powerful tool. It formulates your world for you, making sense of what you see from your experiences, or at least tries to make sense of it. It helps you creatively solve problems. But sometimes your mind is so sure it “knows” what is going on, that you are not really seeing reality but a manifestation of what the Mind is telling you.
When I was young, I was sure I knew what I knew. It was a hard lesson to learn when I realized what I thought I knew, I actually did not know. Navigating in an adventure race helps bring that concept to light very well. In the 2013 USARA National Championship race in Brown County, Indiana, I was the team navigator. I did not have the confidence to be the navigator, but our primary navigator had to drop out of the race at the last minute, so the task fell to me. I was passable through the day, picking up checkpoints and not getting too confused. But once night came, that was a very different story. I had navigated very little at night, and this was a true test. As we left the trail in search of a checkpoint that was on a spur, I was sure I knew what direction we were going. As we continued, no checkpoint appeared, and we had travelled well past where it should have been. We circled back and tried again. I tried to follow my compass more closely and found that I did not believe my compass. I was sure I was travelling west when it said I was travelling north. How could that be? I got so turned around from the terrain we saw compared to the terrain on the map and from my brain convinced I was going in one direction when the compass said another. I could not reconcile anything. My mind was fighting against reality, and the Mind will never win that fight. We had to abandon that checkpoint.
Since that time, I have witnessed situations where the navigator is sure we are at X location on the map, but nothing matches up. Often you later find that you were not at X but at Y location. When this happens, you are lost, but you can find yourself again, if your mind lets you. If you continue to believe what you “think” is correct and do not rely on the map and compass to find where you are, you may be lost a while.
The problem is, when you know you are right, but reality (the compass and map) proves you wrong, it can be very hard to convince yourself of that fact. Your mind is so confident that you may disregard your compass or say the map must be reflecting what it looked like during the Jurassic period. The most productive option is to erase all your prejudice and preconceived notions, and take a fresh look around you, at your compass, and at your map. Beware of your over confident mind, and remember, your map and compass never lie!
