Expedition (Im)possible
“Time To Dare” series — Article 2
“Consider that what is possible and what is impossible is largely a matter of perception.” Greg S. Reid
I was not supposed to leave for the Donnavventura Adventure Journalist Expedition.
And yet, I could never NOT have left, either!
It all depends on how the picture is framed, and which lens is used to look at this chapter of my life.
Picture Frame One: IMPOSSIBLE — this is not meant to be!
“I will never make it through the selection process.”
I find myself taking part almost out of jest. I don’t know much about this television series, except for what I glimpse, once, when a friend from Sicily calls me up with excitement and says: “Rachel! Switch on the TV, look at Channel Rete 4: let’s both apply for this!” I see women crawling in the mud, swinging from ropes, driving pickup trucks on sand and snow, and taking pictures of wild animals. My attention is tickled, my curiosity is sparked, and I start researching into the implications of applying to get into this all-female Donnavventura expedition team, on a discovery mission to document some faraway place. That year, there are over forty thousand applicants aspiring to get selected for the team of eight (plus a reserve team of four). The odds of making it are truly very low. But perhaps that is precisely what spurs me on: a desire to challenge the odds.
“I don’t even fit the basic candidate prerequisites.”
Women with children have always been turned down in the very first phase of the screening process, ever since the programme’s inception 15 years earlier. Mothers are considered by definition to be at a natural disadvantage, because they are deemed unable to survive the long and strict separation from their families and children — normal communications are impossible during the expedition, only exceptional emergency calls are allowed. At the time, I have four children, aged between three and ten. It is an arduous task to persuade the organisers that this will not impact my behaviour during the expedition. Nobody believes this is possible, the expedition leader certainly does not. Perhaps that is exactly what fires me up. The apparent mismatch between my candidacy and the established model: I like to break the rules.
“OK, even if I do make it into the team, I won’t actually go: let it just be a fun game.”
Naturally, this is not a thought that I can voice openly. It would be inappropriate and flippant. It’s simply a half-promise that I whisper to my husband, to justify my partaking in the final selection weekend: yes, I have made it past the first round. So I am up there in the mountains for a rough and tough weekend of intense testing and probing, exclusively to prove to myself that after ten years of pregnancies and daily mom-wife routines I am still capable of climbing, riding, gliding, carrying my mountain bike on my shoulders across the torrent, writing a report, taking pictures, telling stories, competing, and making an impression on those around me. Does that Rachel still exist? I need to seek, find, and brush her up! I suppose that’s what ignites me: the urge to probe my utmost limits.
“I have made it into the team, but I will stay at home and just be part of the reserve squad.”
This is what I tell myself, as the organisers decide which women will be the first to begin the expedition, and I have already been singled out to be amongst those. That’s what I tell myself, but I no longer quite believe it. Adventure-fever is seeping fast into my spirit. Yet, still it feels like fate might just take on a different last-minute twist somewhere: I rest in the soft illusion of denial, through causes beyond my power.
“You are aware, I hope, that if you depart, your marriage might not survive the test?”
Thoughts articulated, insinuated or simply implied by certain awkward silences, on the part of some relatives and friends. Sparse words, sufficient to nurture a slight tremor. Indeed, this is not something to be taken lightly. In this respect, my husband is magnificent: he does not pronounce himself, and his silence creates a space where my free will can find its true essence and expression. While I feel the great fragility of the circumstance, and opposite voices within my heart, I am poised on the brink of an existential threshold, and vertigo awaits me on both sides. Do I renounce an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity? Or do I seize it, and risk damaging the two most essential bonds of my existence: the romantic and the maternal tie? Am I about to enrich or destroy all that I have built so far? It’s a dizzying bet. But maybe that is what eggs me on: the spicy taste of risk.
“I cannot leave, after all: my daughter has just had an accident.”
Countdown. It’s Big Departure day, destination Patagonia, mission: “Grand South American Raid.” Everything is ready and packed, my mind is totally focused on the trip. The Expedition Leader has been checking in on me daily during the past ten days, to make sure I have not changed my mind. But I am convinced and adamant. I take the children to the pool for a last dip on this hot August morning, to spend a little time with them before I leave, for 28 long days. When my third daughter trips and falls forward onto the deckchair, bursting her lip, knocking a tooth crooked, and starts to bleed, in a nano-second my mind immediately flash-switches: “farewell expedition.” I am amazed at how instantly I am able to reverse my priorities. The project dissolves, the will accepts all, without so much as a ruffle. I am totally ready to give up on the expedition, without hesitation and without second thoughts, with the mental clarity that only the peaceful surrender to a higher order of things can confer. “Goodbye, expedition.” It is wonderful to have been able to dream.
Zoom out. Zoom back in.
Picture Frame B: POSSIBLE — this was meant to be!
“You will be chosen for sure.”
This is one of the (many) times that my husband saw beyond. He told me since the first moment, with absolute certainty: “if you apply for this, you will be chosen.” He is my second inner voice. I believe and disbelieve him, always. It is unclear to me whether his words put ideas into my head, or whether they are in fact echoes of my own self, projected. When they say that two people in a couple become like two halves of a single entity, perhaps something occurs at a biochemical level? In hindsight I recognise what at the time I only experienced as the thrill of a wild hope: the awareness that I would succeed. I carried it within me when, hair tied back in Lara Croft-style, I showed up at the first interview. I was careful to arrive a half-hour before the casting began, to be amongst the first interviewees and to intercept the jury’s full attention before they grew weary. I felt like I grasped the subtle secrets about playing my cards right: I like to think that I was tuned in, to the ripples of destiny.
“The answer is in the air.”
I am one of those people who tends to capture the mood of the day. It’s like a fragrance hanging in the air. I feel it when things are going the right way. And if they don’t, I pivot and change my trajectory. That morning, everything smiled at me: the sky, the corner of the waiting room, the people I spoke with. I remember Patty, another candidate, and the very clear sensation that we would be part of a same journey — although I could not at the time imagine how much our lives would have continued to remain intertwined, far beyond the Donnavventura adventure. It’s magical to gaze back, and recall those sensations: to slide backwards and forwards along the timeline, following the invisible currents that weave our lives into an architecture that is imperceptibly mapped out since the very beginning. It was destiny that I would depart.
“Can a mother be a Donnavventura?” In my opinion, the answer is a definite NO.
Therefore, I could.
My story is the fortunate and unlikely combination of elements so radically unusual as to not be configurable as a formula. In this respect, the organisers were right: a mother cannot reasonably and peacefully leave her family for a month, literally disappear, without damaging herself and her loved ones. Wherein lies the key, therefore? Perhaps it was a bit like when two minus signs multiplied together produce a plus sign: perhaps because for ten years I had mothered at two hundred percent, body and soul. I had reached a moment of profound transition, a need to redeem the boundaries of my own self: I was going to play out all my cards, hold my breath, and be either lost or reborn. I had done things almost beyond the humanly possible, thereby discovering within me infinite resources of patience and physical resilience: like tenderly rocking my newborn child for the entire night whilst walking to and fro, night after night for weeks, moved by the awe of creation and blissful to sense being so much part of it. I did not miss my children whilst I was away on the expedition. My maternal instinct flicked to standby mode, as though I had a magic switch. I thought of them often, but it brought a soft, warm caress across my heart. I did not suffer the pangs of regret — those that pierce through the chest — that are brought on by things unfinished.
Therefore the existential solitude I strongly felt and traversed was the paradox that made me feel connected and protected within the universe. Perhaps because the man of my life knew and understood me beyond my limitations, more than I could fathom, into the impossible. Perhaps because there were four children, and not one or two. The absurdity of the situation was perhaps the secret key to the safeguard of my own self and that of my family. These are things that I can only decipher with the benefit of hindsight. At that time I was guided only by impulse, by a sort of intoxicated unconsciousness, by an unshakable certainty that everything fell into its right place, that we were beyond the norm, and that by way of some form of magic privilege, Providence would never have devastated such a complex and delicate structure. I am the exception that confirms the rule. It was destiny that I should depart.
Tabula Rasa: discovery or illusion?
I was surprised (or perhaps not) to return from my trip (after more than 6 thousand miles of driving and 28 eight days spent with a team of strangers that had become a second family) carrying with me a new awareness: I would have been capable of starting anew, from zero, anything. The journey had restored in me taste of what a new beginning — a Tabula Rasa — would look and feel like. Truth or illusion? Little does it matter: it is more a matter of outlook than a postulate that needs factual verifying. In this respect, Donnavventura restored me to myself and allowed me to rediscover Rachel, stripped bare of her outer layers.
After more than fifteen years of almost total symbiosis with my man, during which time I honestly would not have been able to tell what ideas came from me, what ideas came from him, and what came from both of us jointly, I had felt the need to sound out who I was, by myself, without him. Perhaps I will never truly get to the bottom of that. After all, our physical separation during that month still contained a presence in terms of concept and awareness.
More than ever, I feel that my life has been guided by an invisible and benevolent hand. I have since then often tried to imagine how my life might have unfolded had I never gone on that expedition to Patagonia. Where might I be today? Would I be here, and be who I am, now? Would I have reached the same point via some alternative confluent path? Eternal and unanswered questions at all the crossroads of “ what if’s…” Anyway. It was destiny that I should depart.
The Appointment.
It was destiny, because on that fateful morning of the incident by the pool, within a half hour the scale is radically tipped, again: the bleeding stops, the dentist is found, the crooked tooth is a baby tooth, and all is reconfigured just in time. That evening, I am at the airport, dressed in my Donnavventura uniform, ready for departure. It’s my destiny… punctual at our rendez-vous!
“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”
William James, The Principles of Psychology
Hungry for more #TimeToDare stories? Read the Time To Dare article #1 about my experience in the 2015 Regional Dirtbiking Championship
The “Time To Dare” article collection is composed of narratives and reflections about the courage to:
- challenge commonplaces: the inner and outer “no” voices that hold people back from reaching for their dreams
- take the plunge and do unorthodox things
- set ourselves up for “inner success” despite the naysayers, thus growing our personal anti-fragililty by being daring
The stories are based on my personal experiences, endeavours, projects, and on recollections and musings of other daring people that I have met in my life, and that have inspired my behaviour and thinking.
