what I craved was the pain and hardship of a difficult journey

"I realized as much as sharing beaches and pina coladas with little umbrellas and my radiant bride, what I craved was the pain and hardship of a difficult journey. I wanted insecurity, strife, and what others want nothing to do with. This had been missing since I settled down to my lovely life...."

It's 3am, I'm browsing a book on Amazon, found the link on Facebook, having a cuppa. This time of night - I like it a lot. Quiet, no noise, the world is peaceful, time to do whatever....
the cat outside meows, wants to come in. 
The whole neighbourhood sleeps,
Kitaro plays his etherial melodies

...saw Alastair's post,...read the free intro....

There Are Other Rivers

www.amazon.com

Alastair Humphreys walked across India, from the Coromandel Coast to the Malabar Coast, following the course of a holy river. Walking alone and spending the nights sleeping under the stars, in the homes of welcoming strangers or in small towns and villages, he experienced the dusty enchantme...

I'm thinking about what he wrote 

".....what I craved was the pain and hardship of a difficult journey...." 

We need something to cut out teeth on.

The golden cage, is nice, for a while... but too much safety, niceness and we get bored, deep in our soul and we go to seek adventure....

Though these days adventure is pooh pooohed as 'danger' and 'bad' and  unethical, I mean you could get hurt... adventure is not ok unless it is totally 100% safe....

Too nice...

We humans need the excitement of being alive.

Love this guy's outspoken attitude... 

"Now I had a home and I had a wife. I had settled down. Life was good. But perhaps that was the problem." 

When  we are in the middle of the adventure - "What the hell did I do this for ?" we wonder.... . 

When we are back safe, with our friends, by the fireside, over a beer or a coffee,  -- it makes for a great story :-)

Perhaps life itself is such an adventure ? 

We dive into the waters of birth, grow up (plenty of hardship and pain ...), explore, hunt for OUR truth, hunt the mystery of existence (WTF am I doing here ? Why the hell did I ever sign  up for this ... traffic jams, nappies, corruption, pollutioni, beam me up Scotty.... )  ....we get out  difficult journey and ...." here we are...writing blogs at 03:30am....

I look forward to sitting round the fire and comparing stories with my mates. 
"How was your lifetime ? Did ya figure out the relationship honesty stuff ?"
..."Ahh....did I tell ya about the time....."

03:52 hours, Vientiane, Laos

PS: will I  now rush out and create difficult journeys for myself ? 
Hm...nope,
but it IS good to see a guy 'fessing up' to the fact that nice married life might need something else.... 
too much 'nice' becomes suffocating, 
need a challenge, a real challenge, not an office challenge, or a santized, homogenized, and certified safe challenge....



Who uses his light who trusts his vision lives beyond death
this is the Hidden immortal


       --Dao de jJing, verse 52 - Lao Tzu

Living the adventure story: - how to enter a 'mood'

When people tell me to just 'be positive' or to 'see the bright side' or other well meant advice, it does not really do much for me.

What does more for me, if I tell myself a story and place myself INSiDE the story. It goes something like this:


When I feel overwhelmed by things in life, when the problems (or "challenges") start to feel like a ton of rocks and there is no fun at all in life, then I tell myself a story that I told myself in 1987:

"I remember in Kobe, Japan, in 1987 standing on a hillside at a Shinto Shrine overlooking the city and the sea and playing mind games with myself of pretending I was visitor from another planet and I had the choice to bail out or stick it out with humanity & go down with the ship if it came to that worst case scenario. I felt this love and commitment to the beauty and good things in human beings . I decided to see "it" through all the way, to take the risk of humanity destroying themselves or of struggling through to a new greater freedom. Weird stuff really but it kind of makes sense in view of the things I have learned since. Basically it was an affirmation of life and willingness to continue - how much else it was & in what way and in what context is hazy.

The way I actually decided was to imagine myself in a perfect world where I had all I wanted and then I asked myself if I was happy to just enjoy happiness there ?
Then I thought I`d get bored there and would go in search of adventure ( like the Fool of the Tarot) and where would I go ? I’d go to this life, this planet, & I’d be right where I am NOW ! So in fact I was a visitor from this perfect world... having an adventure of life right now, right here.

I imagined also that since Ultimate Reality (god, source, Buddha, whoever...) is perfect and that one day everything & I mean everything will be all right and so this perfect world would always be there, waiting for me. No matter what happened, it would be there, so enjoy life and do the best you can and smile... :-)

.... anyway something like that was what went through my mind as I stood looking out over the city of Kobe, from the Shinto Shrine on the hill... in 1987"


When I feel frustrated with the society I'm living in, frustrated by the bureaucracy and the stupidity (of course I never contribute to any of those ha ha ha ) then I tell myself this story:

I come from a place of no restrictions and as a game I'm trying to expereience different ways of living. So I tell myself that I am a traveller from another country. I am here to living in this country to experience life from just THIS perspective.

It feels a little like being a game designer: Let's create a world where the people don't see and know anything except what is written down for them ... etc...etc... Then I enter that world, in fact that worls is where I am right NOW. (funny coincidence that)

I got this idea above from having lived in different countries. When I lived in Laos for some strange reason I did not mind the restrictions, the things that were less than perfect in my eyes, because I had come to experience a different country and I was a curious visitor. The same attitude helped me in Japan: I was there to experience life from a Japanese perspective, and I accepted things that I would never have accepted in my home country.

Then I realized: I had no home country, every country, every society has its unique 'take' on things, its set of restrictions and freedoms and it is part of the game of life to play by the rules of the current game.

Thai people have the concept of 'sanuk' = fun, enjoyable. They make everything they do bearable and 'sanuk' in some way. They add the little curly bits and the small extras and suddenly things ARE bearable. If you have ever lived in the Kingdom of Siam, or Laos you will know what I mean.

These are the ways of HOW I "enter" a story - or a 'mood' as Carlos Castaneda calls it.

I found that story lets me get into the 'mood' better than simply trying to follow simple advice like " be positive " or "cheer up" .

When a friend was trying to decide what to do, I wrote a story for her here. Stories give people more room to move, they give a three dimensional perspective. Advice is like a picture, a story is like a sculpture, you can walk around it and see it from different angles.

There is a great essay called "On Desert Islands" which talks about the life attitude sense of adventure by Dororthy L Sayers, I'm trying to find it and want to quote bits of it here.
More on Dorothy L Sayers here.