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About the Author and the Endeavor

A Life Away From the Crowd

Article version: July 7, 2022

Timothy Corwen :: Human-Direction Mapmaker :: tcorwen@humandirectionmap.com

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.
—Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters (1925)

What would happen if you pursued your dream – if through inclination, chance, or even ruthlessness, you really did cast everything aside, and went after what you dreamed of doing or becoming?

My own particular dream was to try to understand certain things about our human experience – perhaps not based on cause and effect, but with regard to its patterns, its features and dynamics, and how we can best guide ourselves through it. In following that dream over many years, I found that the sacrifices were more tenacious than I expected – no one swoops down to shower you with prizes for your noble efforts – but also that the sources of strength one can discover in oneself are far more powerful than most people realize.

After all, not pursuing one's dream, and instead choosing to follow a conventional pathway to comfort and success, the big house, many large cars, and the unwavering support for yourself and family that comes with a good job and the status of a successful career – all of those are not guaranteed by such a pathway, and the one thing that is perhaps certain is that you will not have developed the resilience and sources of strength needed to face their falling apart. And you will never know what you might have become.

Childhood as a Rambling Classifier

As a child, I spent much of my free time rambling through the woods of Michigan. But as much as I enjoyed it, I felt there was something missing there. The question that obsessed me was, what was the point to it all?

I knew I wanted to find the order of things. At first, I thought that meant starting with nature and using notecards to classify animals and plants along Linnaean lines. But later I realized that I myself and the people around me were a far more interesting subject. For one thing, I had this sense that nature was stable and eternal, with its annual cycle of the seasons and its countless cycles of death and rebirth. We humans, on the other hand, seemed to be rushing wildly and blindly into the future with no sense of proportion or value beyond money and social status – perhaps even toward self-destruction, using technologies to chase our half-formed fears and untried desires without the wisdom to see what we were doing or to control ourselves – and no set of notecards was going to be enough to find order and sense in all of that.

So I was left with the question, where do we find a sense of direction in a rapidly changing modern world? I went through school and even started college, thinking the answer to that would be presented as part of my education, but it never appeared on the curriculum. And even in church on Sundays with my family, I did not find it – for the belief system offered by organized religion simply did not speak to me.

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Athens: Shattered by a Foreign Culture

For much of that period of my youth and extending into my initial college years, I felt that one reason I could not see these things clearly was that I was too close to what I had grown up with. These thoughts were precipitated to a critical point when I experienced what I saw at the time as a catastrophic betrayal by the woman I thought was the love of my life. (Many years later, I realized that I had overreacted to an innocent flirtation and that that relationship could have been rescued; but, on the other hand, it had provided me with a pretext for following my desire to get off the conventional career and family pathway I was on.)

So to gain some perspective, I sought out the fracturing – one might say, the complete shattering – of my normal existence by going to study in Athens, Greece, for my third year of college. Living in Athens in my early 20s meant being confronted with a threefold fracture of my accustomed reality: a new place in which to live, an entirely new culture and language, and a country that was emerging from years of military dictatorship and reacting violently to the pangs of the birth of a new democracy.

Finding that conventional approaches to guidance were not helpful, I was forced to begin the process of rediscovering some of the basic faculties of thought the ancient Greek philosophers and so many others throughout history have used to formulate new approaches to novel situations. I began developing what I would later call the map-and-engage method, and I found that that method enabled me to begin to make sense of some of the more mundane challenges in my everyday life as an American living in a foreign country, and to find some minor points of order in all the chaos. Later I was able to extend that method to address some of the more fundamental issues in life, to create a framework in which I could find a place for myself (for more details, see the article “The Origins of Human-Direction Mapping”).

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Toronto: Last Chance in Academia

The natural place to learn to think and to develop my initial minor advances and my vague desire to delve more deeply into the features and dynamics of human nature and experience with my newly rediscovered method was in a university. I needed to give academia one more chance. So in 1979, I enrolled in the graduate program in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

But did I find what I was looking for? One seminar on Descartes came to encapsulate my understanding of the realities of modern academic life. The assignment was to make a short presentation on an aspect of Descartes’ work, which would then be discussed by the other half dozen students and the professor. Around a large table, one student after another gave their presentation and was applauded by the professor for a job well done. I then gave mine, into which I had put a great deal of thought and effort. The professor reacted by tearing into every point I made. I would have been the first to admit it wasn’t a work of genius, but I hadn’t expected that level of disdain.

Shortly afterward, I discovered how such things worked: The other students had all approached the professor beforehand to learn how they should write their presentation, what he considered the important points in that aspect of Descartes’ work, and how best to view them. I was the only one not to take this essential step. It was clear that to succeed in academia meant learning to find one’s place in the hierarchy of authority. That also meant finding a mentor who could both guide you in what you should think and write, and use their status and authority to persuade other members of the university to look favorably on your efforts, and smooth your path to advancement.

It was felt that there was no need to “reinvent the wheel” (as this was often expressed), so one’s first efforts should be directed toward learning all of the sophisticated versions of wheels of thought already developed over the history of philosophy. But I felt that wheel-building, despite the inevitably primitive form of one’s initial efforts, was an important skill to acquire. I wanted to learn to think, not just memorize and juggle the thoughts of others.

This was, in short, not the pathway I had in mind to pursue my new method and ideas; it involved an intolerable conformity of thought that was antithetical to the more open enquiry I wanted to pursue. So I left after the first term.

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Greece as an Untitled Observer

Returning to Athens meant dropping off any sort of credible career track and pathway to success. Would it be worth it? Would I make enough progress on my own terms to justify giving all that up? Was pursuing my dream going to lead to a perpetually downward loss of status and prosperity, or was there something there to be found that would offer an alternative to conventional success?

I set myself up as a photographer at the Jewish Museum of Greece, with a modest basic income paid largely by a New York cultural organization, taking whatever other photography jobs came along on archeological sites and in museums to supplement it, but rarely needing to work for more than half a day. My rent was never more than $100, in a quite pleasant part of Athens, so I had the space I needed to pursue my real interests, whatever those might turn out to be.

For 15 years, I battled to shore up my emerging platform of an endeavor, to make it solid enough to survive the constant onslaught of social skepticism and my own doubts. This included, but was not limited to, the usual financial challenges, coupled with visa limitations as a foreigner in Greece and the threat of deportation. My subject, which at that point I referred to it as orientation (later human direction), and method of thought became vitally important to my well-being.

At the same time, I did not give up on finding others interested in the same topic, and every week for 10 years, I wrote and sent out short pieces to journals and book proposals to publishers. But my approach was too serious and systematic for fiction, and too unconventional and rough for philosophy or psychology.

On my own terms, however, I did have some notable successes: I made substantial progress in working out the many little things about how to adapt to Greek culture, based on the map-and-engage method. I even found a way to deal with being shoved in a Greek post office (see “The Origins of Human-Direction Mapping”).

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London Spell of Settled Happiness

Then I met my future wife in Crete, and we agreed that the chaos of Greek life was too much and that we wanted a more civilized existence. So we moved to London, and for 10 years we were inseparable as kindred spirits facing the challenges and pleasures of life. I took up work there as a freelance copy editor, mostly for US publishers, and later for Italian and German ones.

During this time of comfort and companionship, I made steady but very slow progress in developing my framework for mapping human direction (or orientation, as I was still calling it then).

Then the whole thing fell apart. We were no longer a couple, and I needed to get out of London. I moved to north Wales to look after an old coaching inn my wife had bought.

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Wales: Fractured Reality Again

Living in Wales, I was confronted with the need to finally recognize that there was no one reality that one could count on in life. In fact, there were a variety of types of reality, and learning to handle each according to its own demands and possibilities was an essential step forward in life – and from that I realized that mine was not only a different endeavor, but it involved a different sort of reality.

I found new terms for the subjects of my interest: human direction and human-direction mapping were devoted to the issue of how we sort out our lives, the directions we take and how we follow them, and where to find order and meaning in life. Whereas science confined itself to a gatekept world, where only facts (data) that had been evaluated and found to be clear and certain were admitted to consideration as additions to a system focused on finding certainty, human-direction mapping involved charting all of the uncertainties and vaguenesses that were such a large part of ordinary, everyday life. That rough world, in contrast to the gatekept world, included having one’s life fall apart by moving to live in a foreign culture, by the breakup of a relationship, by losing one’s job, or whatever.

In Wales, the most salient issue I encountered was the unchecked destruction of the environment. Every year there were fewer hedgerows, and those that remained were trimmed in the autumn to short wooden stalks, removing the berries and other sources of nourishment that wildlife would otherwise have depended on to survive the winter. Trees were cut down to improve the display of properties so passersby would be impressed by the size of one’s house and the extent of one’s property.

In response, I mapped the human directions here, in a first work: The Environment-Sustaining Person. But that book did not sell, so, finally, would any of my progress ever compensate for what I had lost by stepping off any of the conventional pathways to success and pursuing my dream of a new framework for guidance in life? I had kept my dream spark alive over many years, but would I ever find anything that would make up for what I had given up?

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London With New Strengths

After a difficult time in Wales, I returned to London with a better set of skills for understanding some of the basic features of human direction. But in the midst of the chaos and rapidly advancing changes in life in that impersonal metropolis, the issue that confronted me was, how does one establish and measure one’s worth as a person? Was I a complete failure? How, among more than 8 million other Londoners, does anyone not on a conventional pathway ever make a place for themself? And where does one find a stable and lasting source of meaning and purpose in all that?

Gradually I began to see more clearly where the rewards might lie. Using the basic method of map and engage, I sketched the four layers of worth in a person and how each could be developed and sustained appropriately. In particular, I found new sources of strength in the capacity to reach into the fourth and deepest layer of worth of person, which could not be achieved on more conventional entitlement pathways alone. This meant developing a capacity to respond to a domain of reality characterized by harmony, wholeness, benevolence, vividness, and meaning, in the form of that that spoke to you. This had once been the prerogative of religion alone, but in a diverse modern world, entirely new approaches were becoming more important. And such a connection to a domain of greater value was far beyond what you could ever, in your limited way, hope to acquire for yourself, no matter how successful or prosperous you became. I spelled all this out in a second book: The Worth of a Person.

Conclusions

A lifetime can take several different forms and embrace a variety of contents (see the Human-Direction Specification Map for Forms and Contents of a Lifetime). My own lifetime has taken a peaks-and-troughs form (due to fractures), and its contents have largely been creative (in response to those fractures), without much presentation as yet. This is in contrast to the more common form of lifetime: a steady course set from school, to career, to family, and finally to retirement.

But what have I learned in all this? Looking back, I have come to realize that none of the cultures I have lived in, experienced in my personal peaks and troughs, have had an answer to where meaning and purpose in life are to be found – at least not one that would apply to everyone. Instead, I have seen people from different cultures who have learned the skills and worked out how to develop the faculty to respond to some aspect of reality that speaks to them and gives them a sense of purpose. What I have discovered is that meaning and purpose are not questions you can find an answer for – rather they are questions you have to learn to live the answer for, and each of us does that in their own way. In my own life, my purpose and greatest source of strength (and of rewards) have been found in working out how purpose, meaning, and resilience in life are to be found – by anyone.

That process of developing the components of worth and purpose in one’s life, recognizing the right domain for oneself, and bringing everything together into a vibrant whole, I described in that second book, The Worth of a Person. And together with the methods and vocabulary of human-direction mapping, it is also a major part of this website.

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Addendum

I was often told throughout my life that all of my problems would be resolved if I simply stopped with all the philosophizing and applied myself to practical steps to make a living, start a family, and get ahead in the world. Then, once successful, if I still wanted to, I would have the material and social support, the status, and the authority to think about deeper things. This view had even been spelled out for psychology in Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943), where that hierarchy takes the form of a pyramid whose foundations are physiological needs, on top of which are safety needs, then the need for belonging and love, for esteem, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-actualization, and transcendence. Maslow states that “human needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of pre-potency. That is to say, the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more pre-potent need” (Maslow, 1943, p. 370). So you should start from the bottom and work your way up the pyramid, only addressing self-actualization and transcendence (and pursuing your dreams) when all of the lower needs are fulfilled.

But this “pre-potency” makes no sense in real life: One has only to think of the starving artist who neglects even some physiological needs, the nonconformist religious believer who has forgone the need for safety and social esteem, or the social or environmental campaigner who sacrifices material and social comforts to pursue an end they believe in.

Instead, the framework I found more helpful for guidance was what I have come to see as the foundational axis of human direction. This is a constantly repeated and advancing cycle of response to challenges and opportunities that starts from seeking and adopting guidance; to positioning oneself (taking a stance based on the guidance) to face that challenge or opportunity; to garnering support from whatever personal, social, and material resources one has available; and finally to taking the practical steps indicated. Very often in our haste, we skip to the third or even directly to the last part of this axis of movement toward what we think our goals to be. In my own life, I have focused very much on the first component - the different approaches to seeking and taking up guidance.

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Further Circuiting to Related Topics on This Website and Elsewhere

We all use the basic map-and-engage method to some extent, generally without recognizing the fact, but the most innovative and original thinkers, such as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, do so with a more advanced set of skills. In particular, they show a remarkable capacity to gather and hold a cluster of inklings, hunches, perceptions, images, ideas, and feelings – jostling and vague-sensing them, perhaps for long periods of time, sometimes decades (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 3). The question of how we can each develop these skills will be addressed in the next article of this website (“How to Think Creatively,” currently in preparation; see also Johnson, 2010), which is to be the first article in a brief tour of the major features and dynamics of a basic human-direction map.

Further, to see an example of how this method has been applied to the different layers of worth in a person and how to advance those in concert, see my book, as mentioned above: The Worth of a Person; while for the question of what is needed for individuals and groups to adopt and maintain environmentally sustainable ways of life, see The Environment-Sustaining Person.

Sources

Berners-Lee, T. (2000). Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web. Harper Business.

Carnegie, D. (1936). How to win friends and influence people. Simon and Schuster.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. Henry Holt.

Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation. Penguin.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396. (For a copy of this, see Classics in the History of Psychology: A Theory of Human Motivation.)

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© 2022 by Timothy Corwen. Updated March 22, 2022.

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