First news from MV Explorer

January 13th, Thursday
We are finally under way, headed for Dominica. After starting the trip in the final stages of a bad cold and walking pneumonia, our flight was cancelled and a one day transit to the ship became two days with little badly needed sleep and a lot of dragging heavy bags from one terminal and gate to another turning my legs to rubber and exhausting my arms. Enough said of the bad news. We made it to the ship! I’m up on my hind legs and I told Jean she can cancel the body bag she ordered for me. Right now she’s in the exercise room and she and her sisters Carol and Phyllis are riding bikes. I’m going to wait a few days until I fully recover to start exercising.

Our ship the MS Explorer is eight years old, beautiful, and a confusing maze of hallways, stairs, and dead ends. So far, I’m an expert at taking the wrong turn or heading in the wrong direction. We have a crew of 191 and a passenger complement of 784. Yesterday we were introduced to the faculty and were saddened to discover that some of the classes are full and that to sit in we should first ask the teacher for permission to attend. This is disappointing as we were able to flit about and sample classes at will on our previous SAS voyage. There is only one class that really interests me, Altruism and Social Justice. I hope I’m able to make the roster. On our previous SAS voyage I took primarily eastern religion classes. I wanted to discover what others believed. Now I want to know “why we believe.” I was disappointed to not find classes in the new field of neuroscience, the science of how our brains influence our beliefs and actions, most of which is below our level of awareness and outside the arena of rationality…more about that later.

January 14th, Friday
We just returned from our first Core Class, the comprehensive class everyone takes first thing in the morning after breakfast. It describes the next port in detail; its geography, climate, religion, etc. It also deals with world issues that pertain to our voyage and it features guest lecturers and a variety of experts. The lead professor first dealt with globalization, which is the theme of our voyage. He described globalization as “an array of forces effectively shrinking our world.” We learned that the term in vogue today in the academic community, to describe much of the world we will be visiting, is “Global South,” replacing former labels like “Third World” and “Developing Nations,”. We will be visiting the lower tier of the Global South.

Today’s guest lecturer was a cartographer, an expert on maps and mapping. We learned that all maps are, in his words, “lies distorting reality.” They simplify reality and don’t tell the whole truth. The worst are maps without scale and he had several examples to show us. Perhaps most important are the legends that accompany maps that tell you how the data in maps is represented. The map most of us are familiar with is the Mercator Projection that shows the US on top and greatly distorts the relative size and position of countries. Greenland for example is actuality one thirteenth the size of Africa although world maps we traditionally see do not represent this reality. It made me recall a lecture I heard given by a USSR expert back in the 1970s. He used a map that had the Soviet Union in the center and showed the US off to one side. It was a very visual example of how we all view the world through individual and distorting glasses. Today we were exposed to other kinds of maps including the Peters Projection that is favored by many professionals. It gives a more realistic representation of the physical world.

All maps are a representation of data and a key to reading them effectively is knowing what the legend represents. We were shown one map three times, each with a different legend. Each map represented the same data in different ways and each looked entirely different. We were told that a map is only a “proposition” and each represents a point of view. Cartographers use maps to present only selected data. While listening to the presentation, I’m thinking what a great metaphor maps can be in describing our individual life journeys. Each of our personal maps is a distortion of reality and may or may not be taking us in the direction we want to go. We are all navigating using slightly different legends, had different starting places, and are currently in different places. We all use guides to help us read our maps and as we travel we fire old guides and hire new. If we’re wise, we continually revise our legends and rethink our scales. Unfortunately, recent neuroscientific brain mapping discoveries are revealing that because we are basically emotional beings who use reason to rationalize our mistaken positions, few if any of us are aware of our true positions and we all have faulty legends. It’s hard to get to the proper destination when one is mistaken about her current location. But perhaps most important, even more than our location, personal legends, and our navigation skills, are our travel mates. Life’s not really about the destination anyway. It’s about the journey and the friends we make along the way. It’s impossible to travel life’s road well alone. As I revise my map and legend during the next 104 days, I’ll revel in the company of my wife and relatives. Life doesn’t get any better than this.