Begin Here: Forge Paths Beyond Any Given Map
Created at: October 8, 2025
Start from your present ground and shape a path no map could show — Søren Kierkegaard
Starting from Where You Stand
Kierkegaard’s injunction begins with the concrete: the lived, messy present of a single person. Rather than seeking a prefabricated route, he asks us to notice our real situation—our limits, responsibilities, and possibilities—and treat it as the only honest departure point. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), he calls this the standpoint of the “existing individual,” insisting that life is not solved abstractly but undergone personally.
Maps, Territories, and the Unrepeatable Self
From that vantage, ready-made systems resemble maps that cannot capture your specific terrain. Kierkegaard mocks system-builders who finish grand designs while forgetting how to exist, a jab at Hegelian totality in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). Decades later, Alfred Korzybski’s aphorism—“the map is not the territory” (Science and Sanity, 1933)—echoes this limit: general schemas help, yet they blur the contours of a life that can only be walked, not diagrammed.
Decision as Path-Making
Consequently, the path appears only after decisive steps. In Either/Or (1843), the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical is not navigated by manuals; the choosing itself reshapes the chooser. Fear and Trembling (1843) dramatizes this in Abraham, whose faith cannot be plotted by public ethics alone. His story, however unsettling, shows that certain commitments generate a way forward only in the act of being made.
How Movement Becomes Method
Yet the movement is not frenzy but disciplined return. Repetition (1843) explores how steadfast practice turns beginnings into belonging; by revisiting duties, relationships, and craft, we discover forms of meaning that epiphanies can’t deliver. The knight of faith walks among ordinary tasks with extraordinary inwardness, demonstrating that steady fidelity—more than novelty—carves the durable contours of an unseen route.
Resisting the Crowd’s Directions
Moreover, genuine direction often requires disobedience to the crowd. In Two Ages (1846), Kierkegaard warns that a reflective, leveling public makes decisive existence difficult, and his journal note “The crowd is untruth” (1846) cautions against outsourcing conscience. To shape a path no map shows, one must resist borrowed enthusiasms and stand answerable for choices that mass opinion cannot underwrite.
Faith as Courage in Uncertainty
Thus, forward motion entails risk embraced with inward courage. For Kierkegaard, faith names the passion to live truthfully without guarantees—an existential posture, not mere credulity. William James’s The Will to Believe (1896) later argues that some options can only be accessed by commitment, not prior proof. In that spirit, clarity often follows resolve; illumination trails the step, rather than precedes it.
Modern Wayfinding: From Means to Moves
Finally, this ethos animates contemporary practice. Effectuation research in entrepreneurship (Saras D. Sarasvathy, 2001) advises the “bird-in-hand” principle: start from current means, take affordable risks, and co-create with stakeholders—precisely the logic of beginning here. Similarly, design thinking’s bias to action treats prototypes as questions asked with the hands. By iterating from the present, we discover paths that no prior map could have predicted.