The Fourth Terrain, Your Own Life
The fourth terrain is you. On the first three you could step back; here you cannot. And much of what you know about yourself was never observed; it was learned. The Three Tells of a Blueprint will not tell you anything new here. What they will do is separate what you saw from what you were taught.
Here there is no stepping back
Three terrains are behind us.
On the first we started with a pencil. Someone made it, and what he meant by it was still in the thing. On the second we laid the same ruler against a leaf. Nobody made it, and there were two explanations. On the third we looked at a path worn across a lawn. An enormous number of people made it, and not one of them was making it.
Now the fourth terrain. Your own life.
Three things change at once here.
One. There is no stepping back. The path across the lawn appeared from a second-floor window. Your own life has no second-floor window. The hand holding the ruler and the thing it is laid against are the same.
Two. There is one specimen. A hundred leaves gave the same rule. A life happens once, and other people’s lives were seen from outside, which does not make them comparable evidence.
Three, and this is the big one. Much of what you know about yourself was never observed by you. It was learned somewhere.
Lay the three tells against it.
Do the parts lock together? Pull one out and you will know. Except there is no way to pull one part out of a life.
What is it for? This one can be asked. What has to be watched is where the answer comes from.
How is this different from random? This can be asked too, though with no repetition there is little to lay it against.
All three questions stand. The answers do not come easily.
And when an answer does come, that is when to be most careful — because it has to be sorted into what you saw and what you were taught.
Measuring is not grading
There is a place here where you slip immediately.
Turn the ruler on yourself and you stop measuring and start grading. Was my life well spent or wasted? The moment that question arrives, the ruler has become a scale.
The three tells do not ask that.
Measuring the pencil on the first terrain, nobody asked whether the pencil had lived well. The questions were whether the parts locked together, what it was for, and how it differed from random.
This instrument asks whether a thing is there, not whether it was done well.
And here is where this terrain has to be most honest.
On the third terrain we watched out for lines drawn after the fact — for the fact that whatever line you draw through what already happened, there is no second set of evidence to argue back.
Your own life is the worst such evidence there is.
People draw lines through their own lives several times a day. In a good mood it all looks like it meant something; in a bad one it all looks wasted. Same life, and the morning line is not the evening line.
So what the ruler can do on this terrain is very small.
Small, but there is one thing.
It can sort what you know about yourself by where it came from.
What I found out at sixty-six
It came to me at sixty-six.
I had a pain in my abdomen. I went in, they ran the scans, and I was told my appendix was on the left.
Rare, they said. But what held me there was not the word rare.
Sixty-six years.
For sixty-six years I had lived believing my appendix was on the right. It had never once occurred to me to doubt it. And that day I understood.
I had never observed my own body. I had been taking what I was taught for what was in me.
Nobody had lied to me. The appendix usually is on the right. What I was taught was not wrong.
It just was not true of me.
And there is a quieter part to this. Even when the organ has moved, the pain does not always arrive from the new side. The body can still report from where the textbook says it should be.
Which is why sixty-six years went by without incident. There was never an occasion to ask.
Is the body the only place this happens?
Of everything you know about yourself, how much did you arrive at by observing yourself?
Where did the rest come from?
Which of the three are you?
The ruler has come through its last test. Of the four, this is where it did worst.
No stepping back, no repetition, and the evidence itself borrowed from others. So whether all three tells hold across your life is something this instrument will never settle. Not saying so would collapse everything that came before it in a single paragraph.
And yet the ruler did separate one thing here.
Of what you know about yourself, it can divide what came from watching yourself from what came from the standard. That alone repays the cost of making the instrument.
Here the ruler goes down.
Taken as one lump, a life cannot be measured at all — too large, happening once, seen only from inside. It has to be divided. The body, learning, work, love, marriage, children, money, growing old: eight of them.
No ruler is laid there. There you look for the grain — which is not measured but followed.
The four terrains are finished.
The pencil on the first had someone who made it. The leaf on the second had two explanations. The path across the lawn on the third had a direction nobody designed into it.
Which of the three are you?
You do not have to answer here. But if the question has never been put to you before, it is worth looking at which of the three you have been assuming you were.