My Greatest Adventure Was Learning Not to Have Another
Sometimes, the hardest journeys lead within.
One hot April morning, as I was shaking the scorpions out of my boots in preparation for another day of cutting trails on the Southern Baja, my sister called and told me her son was turning one. Ignoring my bewilderment at the audacity of time — to still be passing, in my absence! — she asked if I’d make it home for the party.
I looked down at the mud caking around my feet. Rainy season had only just stopped, and there were miles and miles of thick, thorny bush to get through before we’d be able to ride across the mountains. Work for weeks, if not months. In a place with horses, beaches, and endless tacos. All mine, for free, so long as hands were needed.
“Maybe,” I mumbled, in a voice that didn’t even convince myself. The party was three weeks away. In Sweden.
“No worries,” my sister replied swiftly, her tone cutting not for its disappointment — but for its lack thereof. “It’s not like anyone expected you to.”
Ouch.
There’s an Eleanor Roosevelt quote I’ve had blu-tacked to the wall of all my bedrooms (to date, thirty-nine): “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” My sister didn’t tell me I’d been away for too long. She didn’t have to. Instead, she gave me a slap, and it woke me up to the message I’d been sleep-walking past for years: It was time to stop moving.
What might I have missed in my rush to go elsewhere?
I was eight years into my twenties and had spent them in as many countries. I’d started out as a teacher, spinning the proverbial globe every December to pick a new South East Asian country to explore. The day after leaving the boyfriend I had somehow picked up between bowls of phở, same-day deals to Kuala Lumpur and a very exotic bout of Dengue, I bought a one-way flight to Mexico, where, for years, I hopped between horse ranches, surf camps and highly questionable shamanic gatherings. After a particularly stern FaceTime session with my mum beneath a palapa, I promised to grow up and proceeded to drain my Swedish student loan on a term at university in San Francisco, before realising there was no way I could earn enough money to graduate without incurring the risk of prison, deportation, or both.
Maybe, just maybe, it was time to stop taking the leap. To stop jumping before looking. To build a staircase, rather, and make my way back up, so I could cast a glance at the terrain before setting off on my next adventure. Or, for that matter, take a look at the ground I’d been jumping from. What might I have missed in my rush to go elsewhere?
Now, don’t get me wrong — I’d had some good times. Upping sticks and finding yourself twelve hours later in a whole new country is pretty much the best feeling ever. It’s up there with multiple orgasms, falling in love, and watching your old bullies go through terrible, terrible breakups. (Just kidding, I voluntouristed at an ashram in Dharamshala and am now filled with lovingkindness! Ok fine, not for Caroline. IT’S CALLED KARMA, BITCH.)
Anyway, where was I? Right. Life-Changing Adventures™. They’re great. Truly. Go have them.
I’d seen rivers, mountains and gorges. But I’d missed weddings, births and deaths.
However, at twenty-eight, I had changed my life so many times it had become routine. I could hoe a field, catch a runaway donkey, and get a great deal on peanut worms in Vietnamese. But I hadn’t learnt to form lasting friendships, solve a conflict at work, or stick around long enough to see the nuances in the humdrum that formed reality for almost everyone I knew. I’d seen rivers, mountains and gorges. But I’d missed weddings, births and deaths.
I hung up the phone and pulled on my sun-dried boots. Flakes of mud, grass and horse poop were falling off as I coaxed them onto my heat-swollen feet. Amid the humming of bees and the faint neighing of a faraway horse, I could hear the purposeful steps of Bob, the ranch owner.
“All good to go?” he asked and handed me my machete. I’d been on the ranch for three months, and had earned enough trust to use one. Not so much to sleep with one. (Though it would’ve come in handy the night before, when I’d had to fetch a steak knife to defend myself against a giant redheaded centipede — the only animal, counting rattlesnakes, exempt from the ranch’s Catch-and-Release policy; I’d had to cut it into seventeen pieces before they stopped individually moving.)
“All good,” I said and got up from the sun-warmed stone wall — a stone wall, I thought with a pang of prescient nostalgia, that I built. “But there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Ten days later, I left Mexico. And now I’m writing this from London. Where I’ve lived. For five consecutive years. They have been the least Instagrammable of my life. And yet, they have been the most adventurous.
Consequences, as frightening as they are, make you better.
The road hasn’t been entirely straight — I did, for example, use a winter break from my master’s to go and learn horse yoga (it’s a thing) in Costa Rica. Another to go and meet the family of my peyote shaman, whom I was briefly convinced would father my future children (spoiler: he won’t). But all in all, I’ve stayed put. I’ve kept the same friends, the same gym, the same phone number. Stayed in one house for three years, and a full-time job for two. Scariest of all, I’m in an actual relationship. With another human being. Who’s starting — are you sitting down? — to know me.
Being known is terrifying. The first time my boyfriend made it past the protective layer of my “sweet and fun-loving” dating persona, I was more frightened than the time I escaped an impromptu prostitution deal in the Sinaloan outback. We stopped talking for a week. I almost went back on the apps in my desperation to find someone new who would still believe my well-rehearsed charade. Who was he to not buy it? Everyone else had! Didn’t he know I was A Great, Un-Tie-Downable Adventurer? Who did as she pleased, and let no dusty old hegemony stop her from ditching everything to start afresh in a new country with new people who would never, ever hold her past mistakes against her?
Newsflash: You should let people hold your past mistakes against you. If you don’t, you are doomed to forever repeat them, until you die, old and lonely, surrounded by a great collection of Aztec plates but with the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old. Consequences, as frightening as they are, make you better. They put you face to face with your essence. Learning to climb a volcano will teach you a lot about your resilience, but so will facing the way you’ve treated people in the past, how you deal with painfully well-aimed criticism, and what you do when someone you love tells you that your actions are hurting them.
I’m not saying I’ll never go travelling again. But more than field-hoeing, donkey-catching or Vietnamese peanut worm-haggling, the greatest lesson of the past decade has been how to deal with discomfort. Not from a chapatti-thin Rajastani sleeper train mattress, or even the slam-dash sting of that giant redheaded centipede, but from within. What do I feel when I can’t run away? Where does that feeling come from? And what will happen if, instead of logging onto Workaway and finding another tropical locale to distract me from it, I lean into that discomfort, and ask:
What are these itchy feet trying to teach me about standing still?
