The Menu is Not the Meal

As we move into winter in this “Pandemic now”, a key focus for us (and in my writing) is on “Proactive Resilience”. Some thoughts today to support each of us with our resilience.

I have been musing recently in my daily posts around layers of context and language. This also brought to mind the term “The Map is not the Territory”, as I wrote about in this post from 2019 which itself links to a fantastic longer post from Farnam Street.

One way I link this to proactive resilience is for us to see the world, not representations of it. When I go for a walk this Autumn, I see the trees, the leaves, I marvel at the colours. When I went for a walking meeting amongst autumn colours last week with someone I hadn’t seen in person since before lockdown in March, I was present to them, to that moment.

Alan Watts was a master of presence and giving us new and varied ways to anchor to the present. He was also very fond of a phrase similar in meaning to “the map is not the territory”, he said: “the menu is not the meal”.

I share with you this passage, then a short youtube clip of his wondrous voice saying the words), expressing things so much better than I could:

..now when I use the word thinking I mean precisely that process translating what is going on in nature into words, symbols
or numbers.