"Life without a map."

Navigating the unexpected.

Grant Farm, Ashpohtag Road: Norfolk, Connecticut, 2020. Photo by Cara.

DECEMBER 3—Perhaps we are luckiest who learn early that life rarely goes as planned. I was not so young when I realized all my plans, however well laid, were based on little more substantial than hope and dream. It’s a nerve-wracking situation living daily with the knowledge that stability is illusory. Hard work, good intentions, careful planning—if they pay off, have as much to do with luck as anything. It’s a bitter realization but also curiously clarifying.

Thinking of well laid plans, and how most of mine have gone awry, prompted me to revisit Robert Burns’s famous ode, To a Mouse. It’s worth staying a few moments with the challenge of deciphering this 18th century Scots-language poem before consulting an English translation, because doing so invites one deeper into its world—where these several centuries later we discover our own.

Having disturbed a mouse—destroyed its small home while plowing a field—Burns turns a mundane encounter into a contemplation on the nature of existence and being human. He begins the poem describing a breakage, a severing of the bonds between man and the natural world such that other beings cower before us. What was true in the late 1700s is of course even more so today, as poignantly described in the second stanza:

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion Has broken Nature’s social union, An’ justifies that ill opinion, Which makes thee startle, At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An’ fellow-mortal!

Burns recognizes in his poem the terror inflicted upon the mouse and—with winter’s approach, its home in ruins, and no prospect of rebuilding—the tiny animal’s vulnerability, the fragility of its life.

It matters greatly the breaking of our bonds with other creatures—our earthly companions, human and non-human—because we come to know ourself most fully through our communion with the natural world and with others. It is in relationship that we learn and experience love and compassion—these the most important guiding stars for a life well-lived.

As many will know, the poem is most famous for the second to the last stanza which includes these two lines, as translated into English, and which have passed into aphorism: “the best laid plans of mice and men, often go awry.”

Recognizing in this regard, his equality with the lowliest of creatures Burns concludes his poem with a most astonishing insight, and one central to Buddhism: humans, tormented by our thoughts of the past and fears for the future, too often miss the present moment—and so miss our lives. The mouse in being touched only by the present is blessed. The concluding stanzas:

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! The present only toucheth thee: But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!

There are many worthy guideposts in life—poetry one of them, deep contemplation of nature another—but there is no reliable map so far as I can tell. Indeed, life cannot be mapped because the terrain, as the soil of a plowed field, is constantly shifting. To find our way then we must be attentive to the present unfolding moment—to what is uncovered as we plow—and bring to it all the intelligence and kindness we are capable of. And should we fail—as I have many times—take heart and carry on.

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Note: I found To a Mouse on the Poetry Foundation website, a marvelous online resource.