SO WHERE ARE WE?

It’s the 3-year anniversary of the Covid pandemic, when the world shut down and everybody reevaluated their lives and how they lived them.  Now things are “mostly back to normal”, but not really.  Most of us have survived and we are doing better than we were last year or the year before, but….this is far from normal.  Many of us have questioned some of our most basic premises about how to function in the world and what the future holds.  This is not stuff to be taken lightly.  And it has some map-related correlations.  Most everyone has heard the term “roadmap”, used to describe having a clearcut plan how to proceed with a project to get a desired result.  It has directions, milestones, and broad guidelines so everyone can know their part and when they should act…and everyone else can rely on this information.  This may sound like a small thing, but it is anything but.  It is akin to “knowing the future” and we all can relate to how many times we’ve said those words in the last 3 years.  Who has reliable information to share and who can be trusted to bring you safely to your desired goal?  This is the very heart of why we made maps in the first place, and it is as resonant today as at any time in our lifetimes.  It’s what I think about, even now, when I start a map, even if the place is well-defined and well-known.  What am I choosing to depict and why.  Although I try to be faithful to the subject, choices are constantly made as to what gets emphasized and what is less important.  This is what has always been done and what we are all trying to do now with our very lives and those around us.  During these past 3 years, I made new maps of areas that were a little further out than I typically did, up in New England and down in Texas.  I re-worked my website, www.coastalartmaps.com (shameless plug!), to update it and make it more user friendly.  I thought about typical holidays, like Father’s Day, when maps have been purchased and how people were, understandably, not prioritizing this type of thing with all the real life problems that they were facing.  All these little things I was doing to help me stay together and focused served as real reminders of what a rough time we were all going through.  And now here we are, March 2023, with a hopefully optimistic horizon dawning.  How is your roadmap and is it clearly delineated.