Thoughts Over A Midnight Snack

Is this even the right thing to do? To stuff my face when ideally my mouth and eyes should both be shut.
I’ll take an ice cream over pistachios to sugar myself up.
In an ideal world, I’d have gone by the clock. But aren’t we leaving behind ideals, breaking the order, finding light in the night?
Not a good idea to surrender to sleep.
Too many asteroids shooting around tonight.
I could get shunted into oblivion.
Mars on one side. Jupiter on the other.

When we do move to Mars, I wonder how we’ll get around.
How we’ll discover its beauty and bounty and the luminosity of its Red.
Just like we found our way through the Earth? I sure hope so. But I doubt it.
I remember being led astray by the joy of a map. They are transporting: filled with wonder, possibility and adventure. It’s quite like a good book, filled with magic. Allowing us to escape to another place whenever we might want to, or need to.

Geography comes alive in Maps.
The drawings of discovery our great explorers made to share more of our own world with us.
It’s hard to imagine a world without them.

An Art. Where a flat sheet helps make sense of a round world.
Conjuring and delighting like nothing else!

They’re lost now, aren’t they?
But back then, when I was besotted by this manner of storytelling – every purposeful line, shape and symbol, every value learnt, every direction found and taken, a significance that gathers variety everytime it runs through our minds –
It was a treasure chest of everyday discoveries; the little but important things.
Today, our routes are traced on our phones; those maps in travel books carried when backpacking to all corners of the world are now explored on solar-charged iPads at the stroke of a finger.
It’s still a sensory and tactile process, though a screen is no substitute for the feel of a paper chart.
Take another analogy:
The pages of a book smell better than the screen of your Kindle.

I’m relentlessly nostalgic, yes. A tad morose. Unwilling to let go of this ideal bit of old.
But it would be foolish to withhold that the new types of map possess magic too.
In fact, I’m grateful for the maps that new technologies bring – the light on the screen of my satellite GPS; how it buzzes to give me the positioning information I might need. In an instant. More or less.

Our grandfather geographers, who plotted their courses by sun and star, would’ve loved this new world, I surmise.
Be that as it may, I still want my own Atlas of Mars.
It’s a special kind of literature – a compendium of histories and futures that the present can record and inspire.
I’ll take the illustration on paper for my imagination and I’ll take the iPad anyway.

This is how worlds are created and shared.
This is how stories are created and passed down.
This is how new horizons are opened. To fire future journeys.

Per aspera ad Astra: ‘through hardships to the stars’.
And then, to Mars.
I’ll take another scoop for the road.

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