equicentre

I've updated this post, to make it a little clearer!
As far as I know, I made up the title of this post. I was trying to think of a way to describe a measured perspective, one that isn't skewed by hubris or objects appearing larger than they are in our rear view. I wanted a tautology, something like proactive: that would stress through repetition that the centre is tricky to find. There is a problem in perspective: it is relative to our growth. And for all my talk about ideals in recent posts, I will admit that I do not claim to own or in all cases know these ideals.
There's a passage in one of Herder's essays where he sees a Gothic cathedral through a train window, and realises that all he'd been taught of that architecture - as inferior, unfinished - had blinded him to its beauty: precisely because it did look unfinished, it represented process, for instance. Or, what about Goethe: beginning so violently with the movement, and later moving away to the point of dissociating himself from his earlier views. Perspective shifts.
And such is the problem with maps: what goes in the centre? Most maps are Eurocentric, at least, that was the case when I studied geography. The flat perspective will always favour one continent over another. And hence the problem of this post: equicentre: how to have a centre that is equally fair to all components?
I think few are graced with that perspective. We may think we can "see it all", but most often we don't. Remember how the muse, in myth of old, announced that she would bring lies as well as the truth? Similarly, Maxwell wrote of, "pieces of ignorance flying about like birds."
The cornfield of good has plenty of weeds. It is necessary to understand that try as we might, there is always a stone of ignorance in our little boats. Lao Tzu addresses Baconian idols in a passage on education: "Not to love the teacher, nor value the material." One is to love the lesson, above all - otherwise, we drift astray. One is to respect authority or to use authority - not blindly, but because there are important lessons to be learned there. Maxwell explains that if we despise the relation of parent and child, and call them wrong, this will lead to confusion. (It isn't accepting the lesson!) Reverence is to see beyond the first aspect, and to look for the spiritual meaning. "God speaks to us more clearly in these bonds of our life than anything we can understand."

Even our jobs are a spiritual playground. I have been reading (thanks to this post) the NYT interview-column with inspired managers, like Tracey Matura, who explains that she doesn't hire people who can't acknowledge failure. She also raises the interesting point that it can be fatal - particularly to others - to merely emulate "successful" people, because sometimes their "success" is achieved through all the wrong reasons. To see beyond the first aspect. How helpful it is to gather round oneself people who are trying to do good work, mindfully, with empathy.
Maxwell has advice even for this: "I get on better with people of more decision and less refinement, because they keep me in better order." And, "My rule is to avoid the company of young men who I do not respect, unless I have control over them."
He also suggests that instead of working for labour and wages, we are to develop "an inward growth of faith working by love, which purifies the heart and encourages us to wait for the hope of righteousness."
With such insights, I think there can be an equicentre: an inward growth. But surrounded by kindred spirits, to inspire us as we do our good work: because if I can say anything from my own experience, it is the uncertainty that one reaps the fruits of one's labours now. But if we make space for the truly important: space for it to be revered, extraneous details cannot be the centre of such a map, or even be recorded there, and we can feel ourselves freed, if not at the top of the world. It is a map of essence, not appearances; it is a map that doesn't take itself literally.
There is a way to see where we're going in life:  if we "redeem our character through our deeds," as Maxwell writes. If we try to love - and are not full of ourselves, but leave space for others. If we offer up what we have without making a claim to it.
He explains: "Let a man... feel that he has something to do, which he has authority, power and will to do and is doing; but let him not cherish a consciousness of these things as if he had them at his own command, but receive them thankfully and use them strenuously, and exchange them freely for other objects." Also: Maxwell, like Matura, argues that we ought not hide anything - so that we may be criticised, and thus improve. The map is in the lessons; the lessons are not ours, just ours to use.
If we think otherwise, we shall sail as if according to one of those medieval maps, which had that dreaded territory called "the end of the world".

Elements: notebook, doily: hellofriend;  
bow brush; washi tape: pugly pixel.