The World, Revisited.

I have a world map hanging in my room. I love maps, I love looking to see where I am, where others are, what geographical features others encounter, where conflicts are, where I might go. A personal goal is to know all of the countries (and if possible a few of the nationalities within each country). My knowledge is pretty flimsily and I can never anticipate a time that I don’t look and discover something I’ve never seen before. Specific gaps in my knowledge are Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Western and Southern Africa, Maritime Southeast Asia, Southwest Pacific, and Central and South America all appear spotty in my mind. That leaves, my home, the land of my ancestors and my field of study the only places that I wouldn’t misidentify a country. My huge lapse shows that I don’t know very much of the world at all.

This evening I walked into my room fresh from a group chat at our favorite Taiwanese coffeehouse and was inspired upon seeing my map, to flip it upside down – as it now hangs. What do I gain from this new perspective? My viewing habits have changed, my home American, and one of the largest splotches of solid color (it is a political map) that had been about eye level and easily drew my gaze is now no longer a focal point. I remember seeing a map from Australia with the same orientation and I think what this flip has done is draw my eyes away, and out of choreographed quick-scans of the map and forces me to reassess the shapes of each country; and as I relearn each Country’s shape, more deeply understand where it appears.

I don’t consider myself ignorant of the world, but with my admissions of lacking even the basic knowledge of name and placement of many countries – or more accurately: land with man drawn borders that, hypothetically divide two nations but rarely seem to do so without conflict– I am much more ignorant than I generally admit. I hope this new orientation will effectively coincide with the destruction of barriers in cultural understanding that my Friends Global World education brings.