The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing.

It’s a beautiful proverb; one enjoyed by therapists and martial artists the world over. It makes a great meditation, a provoking opening for a poem, and a wise counter for pontificating intellectuals.

But what does it truly mean? Like Smee, I feel “lightning done struck my brain” when I think on it too long.

There is danger in believing we know something of this world.  We live such a short fragment of history, only a wink in the scope of things.

Consider that the phone was invented in 1876–mereley one hundred years ago–and the electric telegraph was less than fifty years its forerunner. The model T (the first combustible engine produced en masse) wasn’t born until 1908.  And computers, ah the viral digital world rivaled only by the television for its invasive hold on our lives, those didn’t arrive on the scene until the late ’50s, and the home computer is a mere thirty years old.

All of these things are possible only because of mass production of steel, an art developed by Bessemer in the mid-1800’s–Henry Bessemer, an unknown name who played a pivotal role in the second half of the industrial revolution.

Our world, as we believe ourselves intimate with it, is only a very brief flash of history. And even this is distilled, idealized, and altered by the men who recorded it. And yet, like those who came before us, we think ourselves masters of history and informed.

Know who else thought themselves informed? Doctors in the 1800’s truly believed they were helping women when they examined them during childbirth. We know now that they killed 1 in 4 because those laughable child’s fancies (i.e. germs), really weren’t so laughable; it really is important to wash one’s hands after examining that dead body and before you check a woman’s cervix for dialation.

The Aztecs firmly believed that they must murder thousands of tribes from the south american jungles in sacrifice or their gods would destroy the world with quakes and pestilence. Yet their sacrifices came to an abrupt halt and the world–even their temples–still stand.

While we cannot become stagnant for fear of our ignorances, we shouldn’t become so arrogant to think our understanding is complete; we shouldn’t think we know things for what they are.

Most all of our knowledge is pure trust; pure belief; pure fantasy — how many of us have seen a whale in the water, a seashell still in the ocean, or touched the moon? We only fabricate an understanding of them based on the preponderance of words we are offered.

It is important to humble ourselves with this epiphany daily so that our knowledge of the world can be tempered by our understanding that we only hold some of the pieces of this puzzle and only a small fragment of history.

For the word is not the thing, and the map is not the territory.