Writing Life

In a recent blog entry, I mentioned in passing something known as the Mercator Projection. Invented in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, the Mercator Projection is a formula that allows a round object (usually the Earth) to be entirely mapped on a flat surface. The major flaw in the Mercator Projection is that it causes landmasses near the North and South Poles to appear larger than they really are. On a standard Mercator map, landmasses at the equator maintain their relative size in relation to the earth, while landmasses near the poles can appear many times their actual size. The reason for this is fairly simple. Imagine if you wanted to cut up a basketball and pin it to a wall so that its entire exterior surface formed a perfect square. If you slit the ball in half from pole to pole, it would be fairly easy to stretch the ball out at the equator and put a nail at each end of it. But to stretch the ball’s two poles as wide as the equator would be virtually impossible, unless you possessed superhuman strength or a very stretchy ball. If, however, you managed to accomplish this feat, the tiny wording at the top of the ball that tells you how much air pressure is necessary to fully inflate it would be stretched so wide that it would appear nearly as big as the manufacturer’s name – Wilson, Spaulding, Rawlings, etc. – at the ball’s midsection. Ordinarily, the biggest beneficiary of the Mercator Projection is Greenland. Though only about one-fifteenth the size of Africa, Greenland appears nearly as large as Africa on a map that employs Gerardus Mercator’s formula. Generally, the North and South Poles are illustrated in separate insets at the margins of a Mercator map, otherwise they would run the full width of the map, greatly exaggerating their dimensions. In theory, if you placed one penny on the exact spot of the North Pole and another on the exact spot of the South Pole, photographed the earth from outer space, and then converted that photo into a Mercator Projection map, the two pennies would end up looking every bit as wide as the equator.

It occurs to me that there are life lessons that we can learn from a wide variety of natural and man-made phenomena. In the film Up In The Air, George Clooney portrays a motivational speaker named Ryan Bingham who spends most of his time traveling in airplanes from one American city to another. Bingham almost literally embodies the phrase “living out of a suitcase.” As a result, suitcases have taken on enormous symbolic importance in his worldview. And when he stands before an audience at one of his motivational seminars, all of his life lessons feature a suitcase (or backpack, or other item of luggage) as a metaphor for life. He tells his listeners (I’m paraphrasing here), “Imagine that your house is on fire and that you have time to save only one suitcase full of material possessions. What are you going to put into that suitcase?” Later he tells the audience to imagine a backpack large enough to hold people in it. “Now fill it with all the people who depend on you in this world and slip the shoulder straps onto your shoulders. Does it weigh you down? Is it too heavy? Or can you still move easily with it on your back?” Mark Twain, or Shakespeare, or Confucius (or some other member of the Algonquin Round Table) once said, “To a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” To Ryan Bingham, the whole world looks like a suitcase. By thinking of such things as familial obligations, material goods, and even love, as something that can be contained in a piece of luggage, he is able to make sense of the world, reduce it to a manageable size.

If Ryan Bingham were a cartographer, maps would no doubt carry enormous symbolic weight in his personal belief system. But even a non-cartographer might benefit now and then by meditating a bit on the Mercator phenomenon. We humans have a penchant for turning molehills into mountains, for magnifying our woes out of all proportion to their true size, for accentuating the negative things in our lives and minimizing the good. The next time you feel overwhelmed by the size of a problem or personal setback ask yourself whether you are viewing the problem on a globe or a Mercator map. On a properly constructed globe, every landmass and every body of water appears in its proper proportions in relation to every other object on the globe. Greenland appears one-fifteenth the size of Africa. Alaska appears one-fifth the size of Brazil. India is longer than Finland. On a Mercator map, the coldest and darkest places on the Earth – i.e. those places near the North and South Poles, where nights can last for months on end and the snow never entirely melts – are hugely exaggerated. Alaska appears as large as Brazil. Finland is longer than India. And Greenland is the size of Africa.

We all go through tough times. We all experience setbacks, failures, and outright disasters. We all get into trouble now and then, but what defines us isn’t so much the trouble we get into but how we get out of it, whether we stand and fight the obstacles that oppose us or simply surrender to them. But we cannot make proper decisions about overcoming our troubles and woes unless we are able to see them properly. To do that we need to project our lives not onto a Mercator map, which exaggerates the cold and the darkness, but on a globe, which puts the whole world into proper perspective. The next time you think you are facing an obstacle the size of Africa, step back and make sure you are looking at it from the proper perspective. In reality, the problem you face may be no larger than Greenland. Heck, it may just be the size of a single penny.