Thursday 26 January 2012

No ceiling

You may be looking at this blog because, in your heart, you’re an explorer, an adventurer. You’ve either acted upon, or will one day want to act upon, a desire to run further afield from current pastures. You may be planning a gap year, a career break or an unorthodox retirement after a lifetime at the mill or you might just have had a crazy idea that you’re determined to make real. Whatever the reason behind your restlessness, you may have already begun to feel the pull of the road, the excitement of new borders, the fresh dawns over ever changing horizons. You might be studying maps and thinking about learning a foreign language.

If you’re serious, then deep down you’ll have a nervous knot but it keeps your senses alert to the nature of the challenge and the closer you get to your goal the bigger the knot gets. Perhaps you’re being reckless and irresponsible, perhaps friends and family think your crazy plans are a bluff, perhaps you don’t have enough money saved. But perhaps you’ll do it anyway. You’ve started to look forward to imagined risks and set-backs and have accepted them as all part of the project. You know for certain that you’re going to do this – it’s only a matter of time. Mark Twain famously exhorted us to ‘explore, dream, discover’ and you’ll take that advice.

This is an account of my own long-time dream which I’m finally beginning to put into practice. When I was planning and dreaming, I trawled through blogs and websites looking for someone just like me. I read the experiences of Alistair Humphreys and Mark Beaumont and didn’t find any impossibilities. The only qualification appeared to be bloody-mindedness. Dangers, surprises and impracticalities seemed exciting, not worrying. So whether it be for research, for reminiscence or for day-dreaming I hope my own future reports can assist you and set you wandering. Forget sensible.

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