Balancing safety and adventure with maps

Sometimes adventure is fun. Hiking a mountain for the first time, visiting a city for the first time, trying a restaurant for the first time. Many times however we want certainty or safety more than adventure. Maps help us with certainty. They tell us how to go from a beginning X to an ending Y, and sometimes even approximate for us the time T for the journey. Maps sometimes go by other names, such as recipe, process, algorithm, guide, article, or book. Somebody has been there before.

QUESTION: What BALANCE do you want between safety and adventure? Safety brings “wages” -- you get what you expect. But adventure can bring “profits” -- rewards far beyond the costs -- although you are exposed to some danger. If you have ways to mitigate the danger, the risk might be worth it.

EXAMPLE: Sometimes a balance can be helpful in getting the overall map right, but allowing for some localized exploration. In Spring 2022, Stephanie and I visited Charleston SC. We knew where Charleston was in relation to us (from a US map), but didn’t dig into a lot of maps or guides about the city itself. Instead we decided to learn about the city mostly by walking. We discovered the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum and the Chubby Fish restaurant right near our Airbnb. These were two highlights of our trip! We felt like we had discovered jewels not on typical “top 10” lists about Charleston. We chose to visit with a sense of adventure, and we got our reward. Had we chosen to review all the guides ahead of time, I suspect we would have found many wonderful places, but we would have missed out on telling friends about places where (so far) none of them had been before.