millsworks

The title of this post is deceptive because I’m in a rush to get the fuck out of here and I couldn’t think of anything else to call it.

My son is working on a project for school – he has to give a presentation on a country and his assigned country was France. First thing we do is haul out the globe and see where France is in relation to where we are on this ball in space. Start big – work inward toward the details.

Parag Khanna gave a talk at TED about maps and borders and how we should observe the past while planning for the future. He used a favourite quote of mine from Mark Twain:

History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.

Khanna shows how maps are not just a product of where politicians and armies decide to draw lines in the sand. The influences that carved the myriad of coloured patches on our globe – always shifting – can be observed and predicted.

Apropos of nothing to do with this post really, other than the title, is a book by Michael Chabon Maps & Legends. It’s about entertaining storytelling. It is fucking brilliant. Read it.

We tell stories about ourselves all the time. That’s how define who we are. Our maps upon the globe and tucked within the pages of countless dusty and outdated atlases are a vestigial layer of our story. Who we are or were. Where we are or were. How and why is also concealed within those geopolitical quilts – if we know how to look.

The stories we tell to our children and to each other are maps of our journey through life. The borders shift and change. The colours alter their hue or fade with time. Fact or fiction they are all stories, they are all maps and they all change.

The project on France is doing very nicely, thank you. By the time my son makes his presentation in class he will know as much as he can about the history of France, the culture, the language, the food, and the geography of that sectioned off surface chunk of this spinning globe in the black of our solar system. I’m already very proud of him because when we first looked at the globe he said:

The world isn’t really like this – we could draw lines anywhere we want – and you still can’t see them from space. I think we just decide to make them because we want to be different.

Smart kid.

I have no idea where my future map will take me or what the lay of the land may be – but I do know I my borders have been expanded because my story now includes my son and his view of the world.

I’m out of here.

Cheers.