Your Story, Your Map: a reflection process for meaning and connection

If you have ever walked a labyrinth, the journey is like this. You walk and walk, following a path that turns and changes directions over and over. You have no way of knowing how far it is to the center, until suddenly you are there. Once at the center—a symbolic place of insight and wisdom—you stay as long as you wish. Then it is time to take that

This is why seeing our is work helpful. Once visualized, our work takes the form of a narrative, plotting out the story of our daily lives with telling details such as actors, action, location, implications, and backstory. This narrative is told through the map of our work, which graphically depicts our work’s contexts and relationships.

It is much more important to have a compass pointing to a concrete objective than to have a map. Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, encourages us to use the principle of “compass over maps” as a tool to navigate our world of uncertainty. In the book Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, he and Jeff Howe write, “In an increasingly unpredi

Your life is made for your searching—not for a predefined destination, but for the joy of discovery and the satisfaction of knowing that your efforts are making a positive difference in the world. So go forth and explore with an open mind and a generous heart.

When we talk about finding a calling, we’re not just seeking an activity. We’re looking for an identity, an understanding of who we are. We want to be complete, to make sense of the story of our lives. But whether we recognize it or not, this quest we’ve been talking about is not just a physical one; it’s a spiritual one. It is, in a way, a journey