#64 A Journey To Distant Lands
Today, our protagonist battles with the definitiveness of life choices, and how to find your own path in a world of ideas about the right ways of doing things.
As always, there’s a musical accompaniment for this work. The excellent Hurray For The Riff Raff has a new album, The Past is Alive, which is just so worth listening to. Enjoy!
If this is whetting your appetite for more, deep fry your mind in the oil of the archive.
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#64 A Journey To Distant Lands
Our little plane rocks and jolts while I gaze out the window at the endless whiteness of thick cloud. It’s my first time in these exotic lands, where despite my studied background, despite my instinct for open-mindedness and desire for embracing culture, my impression is still pockmarked with stains of television adverts showing starved children, diseased women, and homes of sticks built over puddles, densely populated with millions of people in squalor; with movies that characterise their people as criminals willing to commit the most egregious of inhumanities, or as remote tribes who worship absurd gods, titans of anti-environment industry who’ll cut down every tree in sight for a few extra quid. But what I’m here to see is the colour, the beauty, the intelligence that exists at the heart of big, international political interests.
I think about when I was at university, when I studied international relations and we played games - the model UN, conflict mapping, pandemic responses (we literally played the board game Pandemic). All it ever felt like to me was games, theory, hardly an education. I was a timid nineteen year old who mindlessly partied, who watched friends do bad Shakespeare, who sat at the back of lecture theatres trying not to fall asleep. I had no vision for how my life would pan out, no idea of “what I wanted to do for a living”. I met smart people who’ve now gone on to write scripts for television, to do casting for Hollywood directors, to go into Parliament or move to Silicon Valley. And I always thought I’d stutter along and find a job I liked that came with little stress, buy a cottage, read books, walk a cocker spaniel and watch the rain. So how did I end up here? On this plane? Going into this job?
The lady next to me coughs as she chokes on some peanuts and sips her bottle of water. She looks over at me embarrassed, and I offer her a smile. I turn away.
I don’t really know how I got here. I suppose it’s the same way most people end up anywhere. They meet someone who says something which inspires one event, circumstances align to mean one thing can happen and another cannot, and on and on it goes until you’re sitting on a plane staring out into the bitter white sky with fear and excitement crawling all over you.
The plane jumps all of a sudden and I feel the full force of it pushing under my bum and into my legs, and the lady next to me shrieks, discomfited. I breathe out from my mouth and in through my nose. I think of Mum and Dad and how worried they’ll be about me coming to a place like this, all on my own, faced with uncertainty. I start to wonder whether I’ve made bad mistakes, whether I’m in over my head, whether I’m going to be stranded in a land I don’t know, with no friends, no life, no ability to just hit pause and have a break.
The plane jolts up and down again and again, each time more aggressively than the last. There’s the bing of the speaker and the crackled voice of the air steward. I think of my Dad who always described planes as ‘giant tin cans’ which never elicited a positive response. I can’t put my life in the hands of a tin can. Now it’s rattling extremely, so forcefully I can’t keep my hands on the armrests either side of me, the lady’s head next to me is just a blur is different images. I close my eyes.
I took this job for the ‘opportunity to do something different’. Because everyone needs to be feeling to be going somewhere, to do something extraordinary, to pursue ‘experience’ where home life is seen as boring. But I never felt that. I only ever felt that those people weren’t choosing to pursue ‘experience’ close to home. They were lazy. They pursued wild adventures because they had no imagination. It’s the equivalent of a teenager endlessly playing virtual reality shooter games with extreme, violent graphics, and avoiding the board games in the cupboard that might objectively be better games. It’s not artificial stimulus, but it’s on the way. That said, I’m here. I was sold on it. Sold on someone else’s dream rather than having the courage to just be me.
I open my eyes and look out the window. Clouds whip past the window violently, and I try not to think about it. The plane punches its g-force upwards and into me, so much so I thought it might crush me. And then I look again to the window, and the plane drops fast and the blood rushes up my legs and arms into my head. And then the cloud disappears and all I can see is miles upon miles of green forest and farmland, and in the distance, mountains. It’s like a scene from a Turner painting, wisps of white dotted across a canvas of colour. And somehow in that moment, the tension drains out of me. I feel a strength fill my arms and hands and legs, and a sense of empowerment that I can achieve what I want to, that I can find that richness of life we all want here. And actually, it’s not so different from other places I’ve been. How much can I struggle here, when the world’s rules are the same as mine? Gravity, the sun and the ocean, language, human connection, family, friendships, music, laughter. These things are universal, and I know them and I can know them here.
I breathe deeply as the plane descends into our landing port and I step into my journey.
