The world we know is defined by what we see, touch, experience, and imagine. Its boundaries are the boundaries of our mind. Little kids put everything they find in their mouths to make a map of their surroundings. It’s a way of cataloguing the environment. They map the physical world around them at a sensory level.

As we grow older, we start using words instead, but the process is the same. When we lack the word or concept to notice and describe something, it effectively doesn’t exist for us. The world is invisible, or is not there, until it is carved out from its chaos and organized within our systems of thought.

Depending on how we map things, we come up with different worlds, different sets of values, visions, ideas, aspirations, and possibilities. These worlds are infinite.

In Japanese, the term ma (間) is used to describe the interval, the space that exists between things. Ma is the silence in music or a conversation, the empty space that shapes what surrounds it 1. This concept is crucial in Japanese culture to make sense of things, and it is necessary for awareness to emerge, to understand that world. In English or most Western languages, there is no exact equivalent: silence needs to be filled; the empty space needs to be used. Silence and voids make us uncomfortable.

In Portuguese, Saudade evokes a deep and nostalgic longing for something that is absent or that has been lost, maybe forever. In Portuguese-speaking culture, this concept is present and common, but also carries the depth of an infinite number of poems, songs, music, and art.
A single word can transmit the meaning and memories of hundreds of years of culture. In English, even if the concept might be felt in a similar way, the feeling is vague and almost impossible to pinpoint as part of our lives.

If we expand this concept to areas where no language or even ideas have ever reached, we realize that the world on the other side, the metaphysical world, is actually immense. We also understand that the world we have built in our brief human history is minuscule in comparison to the vast possibilities that exist. Our world stops where our ability to describe it or imagine it ends. The universe goes much further, into places beyond our reach, but we can only go as far as our brains can take us. Beyond that is darkness, and we get dizzy. “HIC SVNT LEONES” (Here are lions) was used by Roman cartographers to describe regions beyond their knowledge.

In that darkness, at times, and under the most precious conditions, we can see a glimpse of something mysterious, inexplicable, and ineffable. It comes out and then quickly disappears back into the darkness. It appears as a bridge that, for an instant, connects the unknown, the metaphysical, with our deepest and most treasured memories or thoughts, with our map, just like a rainbow in the sky connects two points in the landscape for a limited amount of time. This vision briefly changes our perspective; it shifts the center of our world because, suddenly, we see there’s something more, something else. So, it throws us off center. That sudden, magical appearance is beauty.