Mistaking the map for the road

Less planning, more living

I’m usually good about limiting the amount of time I spend online, but I falter when it comes to travelling and restaurant-ing. Before going on holidays, I spend more time on the Internet plotting where I will eat at my destination than I actually do at the destination.

My strategizing involves selecting specific walking routes from breakfast venue to lunch venue and lunch venue to dinner place so I burn sufficient calories to justify my gluttony. These walks must also be mapped out to include sights I wish to see along the way. Weeks or months prior to my departure, I’ll peruse a restaurant’s online menu, selecting which cocktails, wines and dishes I will order beforehand, so I don’t end up feeling overwhelmed by the tyranny of choice when I arrive. Before making reservations, I’ll scroll through Tripadvisor photos of the restaurant interior and typical crowd so I know if the place can deliver the specific type of ambience and experience I’m looking for. If it’s a no-reservations venue, planning will also involve researching how busy the place will be and peak visitor times so I can avoid queues. So while I may only have two days on the ground at my holiday destination, for the two months leading up to my departure, I would have spent about two hours each day armchair travelling via Google. Such is the extent of my insanity.

Part of me can see that all this pre-travel research is a waste of time and mental energy, like spacing out on Candy Crush when you could be doing your laundry or inventing a flying car.

“Why don’t you just get there then figure it out?” my husband had asked me.

“And leave everything to chance? You gotta be kidding,” says the voice in my head.

As a human living with computer companions in the age of information, the map can feel safer and, in many ways, more attractive than the road.

The imaginal is more captivating than the corporeal

Even though I know the fault is mine, I like to blame technology for encouraging the perversion of my good sense. Having constant and easy access to Google and AI is like owning a sex slave who stands ready to respond to my every whim. “Where to find the best burritos in San Francisco?”, “Most charming cafes in Budapest”, “New Michelin star restaurants in Hong Kong 2026”. How can I say no?

I’ve indulged my virtual traveling-and-eating habit for long enough to know that whetting my appetite digitally is a set-up for disappointment. When I arrive at the purported “best” place for pastel de nata in Lisbon or croissants in Paris, I am often unimpressed. The pastry wouldn’t taste all that much better than the one I get from the bakery around the corner in my home city. Perhaps it was of a higher quality or at least texturally closer to how an egg custard tart or croissant ought to be, but my fantasizing and anticipating made the desired pastry so much more delicious in my head that my tastebuds could not meet my mind’s expectations. Travel meal planning is like surfing porn, the real woman or man is always gonna be flawed and smelly compared to perfectly luscious digital flesh.

In the same way that hunger and craving can feel more arousing than satiety, imagining a future experience feels more fun than actually being in the experience. In my imagination, there are an infinite variety of ways that a burger or a glass of wine can taste. At a specific, brick and mortar café in a specific town, at a specific time, that variety shrinks and all I taste is that one burger or that one glass of wine. As soon as I take four bites, I begin to feel full. I lose interest in the hunk of meat and bread on my plate. My enthusiasm and appetite — so mighty, robust and full of potential just a few weeks ago as I scoured the Internet with a rumbling tummy — are also vanquished as I become one with the real and very ordinary burger. So, I work on getting hungry and dissatisfied again. This allows me to once more get high planning where and how to get my next “best” burger.

Mentalizing sustains the illusion of personal power and control

Often, I find researching easier than writing blind, theorizing safer than experimenting, planning better than doing. Creating flowcharts and excel spreadsheets, developing outlines and making lists sustains my illusion of control. All this mental work makes me feel like I’m the captain of my own ship, like I’m getting somewhere, like I know what I’m doing and have a lower chance of messing up than the next guy.

Fantasizing, catastrophizing then putting measures in place for damage control, prioritizing and choosing allows me to feel as if I’m on track and prepared for the best possible outcome. “That thesis is pretty much written,” I say to myself as I look at half a dozen folders with color-coded notes and a blank page on my laptop. “I’m pretty sure if I learnt how to ride a scrambler, I would kick ass at it,” I hypothesize, despite knowing full well that I don’t have the nerve to actually ride a motorbike. I wonder why thinking (and overthinking) feels less scary to me than jumping in and just experiencing the thing.

In the “The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature Through the Practice of Presence”. A.H. Almaas argues that the purity of any given moment is often obscured by the projection of our ideas and concepts onto it. “We recognize something common to all our experiences — that they are not truly of the moment; they are colored by our past. We can see the veil, the wrapping that our consciousness has put around itself, which has become an interference. We recognize that the dynamism of our Being is not completely free; the total openness that invites experience to arise freshly, just as it is, is missing. We sense that our experience is occurring through old, musty filters that create a dullness and a darkness.”

This made me think about the metaphor of the mind as a prison. Most of us know only how to exist in the world and see it through the bars of our past experiences, prejudices, stories, and beliefs. The idea of existing beyond the walls of our prison is inconceivable because having been born into it, it is also the only home we know.

The frightening thing about arriving at “now” is that it forces us out of our prison by dismantling our mental structures of control — the bars that represent our constructs and concepts, our desires and fears, our ideas of good versus bad, pleasant versus unpleasant etcetera. Without the projection of our past experiences or our imagined future ones onto the present moment, without being able to ascribe meaning to “what’s happening right now”, the veil or wrapping around our consciousness dissolves. The now, like the shelterless sky — unfenced by recommendations or preferences, likes or dislikes, the acceptable or unacceptable — is felt in all its unknowability.

What would it feel like to just “get there then figure it out”? If I simply allow myself to aimlessly roam through a strange new city at no set time of day (and no reservations) led only by my hunger, I won’t be able to mentally prepare myself for the meal that I will or won’t consume and how I will react to that experience when it arrives.

Perhaps what drives my incessant online travel researching is this fear of not knowing, of having to accept that, even with the best laid plans, I essentially do not have agency over what will happen to me in the future which is coming at me quicker than I can say “just a sec”.

“Here and now” living requires increased comfort with uncertainty

Having no preview means I must trust that all will still be OK even if I don’t get that lemon ricotta pancake at that brunch place that everyone raves about. It might mean I speak with a local to find out where I can find what I’m looking for, or that I follow my nose down some alleyway that leads me to non-descript bakery that sells something more unusual than pancake. Maybe if I stop interfering or attempting to predict or construct my future experience, I’ll be more relaxed and won’t have to strain so much doing this life thing.

“We begin to see that what we are engaged in is a reaction, a projection of our mind onto the moment” writes Almaas. “As we experience an event or interaction, we are generally reacting to what we experience happening (secondary manifestation). This involves judgement, resistance, denial, manipulation, and so forth. When we stop this interference, we become more aware of what is actually arising (the primary manifestation) and begin to understand it. We see that it is not a full, immediate experience of the now. We recognize that we have layers and layers of veils over our experience that make it not completely palpable, not completely alive, not immediate.”

Before we made maps, we followed our senses. We attuned ourselves to the world around us, the rivers, the rocks, the trees, the wind, and communed with it. We looked, touched, sniffed and listened. Nothing had been recorded or measured (3.5/10 versus 9/10) and so everything was new, fresh, wonderful and terrifying. We surrendered and were able to lose ourselves in a timeless, meaningless here and now. All we had to do was show up.

Moving through life without a map requires absolute faith and courage. Without my plans and GPS, I must trust life enough to allow myself to fall completely into its unpredictable, uncontrollable, unknowable arms, fully conscious that it can give me wings or kill me, or deliver anything in between.