Mapping Your Future

 Create a map that is representative of the wilderness of your life. Each region of the map represents a specific stage of your journey that you imagine you will encounter, or would like to encounter in your most ideal vision. These regions have symbolic themes which reflect the nature of what you will experience there. While traversing that area, you will be forced to come to terms with, learn to love, integrate into the whole, a part of yourself which becomes exposed by the circumstances you face there. As a result you must explore what it has to offer and make sense of it. With this comes an understanding that the obstacles and choices you face have been put there to direct your path as you bend and alter your course around them. Thus in the process you are directed into the unknown.

 Draw possible pathways across this map that is a representation of the challenges you anticipate you will face in the months ahead. Wherever a major choice is made create a branch in the path. Create a loose script that sets up the interaction that will take place in each area. This will be a role playing game.

  With a one or more friends, you can visit each stage of the journey where they will attempt to present your anticipated scenarios to you as they understand them, filling in the details. They will ask you what you would do if this or that happened in this or that way, adding their own creative flair. You say how you would respond, then they counter your responses. In this way you explore the scenario until a satisfying conclusion is reached and you move on to the next area of the map.

   One way to do this is to create the map to correspond to real world locations, allowing you and your friends to walk to real locations to lend a more adventurous, atmospheric tone to the experience. The whole map can be tackled over time in sessions.

 The goal of this is to provide a fun way for you to work through ideas about where you are headed in life, a bring those who are close to you into the loop of that creative process. The more mysterious and beautiful the map, the more rich the experience can be.