Shouting from my shed

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On the variety of our world

“World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.
I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.”
– Louise MacNeise ‘Snow’

I am an Englishman. I grew up in an English village. I went to a school full of English kids. My parents, my teachers, my outlook: everything was English.

Then, after leaving school, I went to live in a remote village in Africa for a year. And for the first time I got a sense of how narrow my world had been. I love Britain and much about life here. But less than 1% of the world’s people live here. It was time for me to hit the road, to see what life meant for the other 99%.

It took me over four years to scratch the wanderlust. During that time I cycled the length of the Earth’s three major landmasses. After racking up 46,000 miles of road I had more of an understanding of the variety of our world. It was more than physical diversity (Chinese kids laughing at my long nose, Africans comparing my pasty coloured face with their own, Panamanian Indians stroking the hair on my arms in wonder…). It was more than the exhilarating scope of landscapes, a Siberian winter and a Sudanese summer; the depths of the Dead Sea, the Andean passes. It was more than learning different handshakes in Africa, eating with chopsticks in China, or Bulgarians nodding their heads to signal “no” and shaking them side-to-side for “yes”. The real reward for my journey was understanding a little more about where I fitted in to the framework of the world; to realise how beautiful and fragile our environments are; to have felt safe and welcome on five continents, even in regions more renowned for bad news than good: the Middle East, Zimbabwe, the Caucasus.

A liberating side effect of spending years when everyone I met thought I was a bit weird and different was realising that there is no such thing as “normal”. The appeals of travel – markets, street life, meeting people – is all about seeing different version of “normal”. Pedal far enough from your front door and you will discover that your definition of normal life and normal priorities are very different to most people’s.

Since I returned from the ride I have been far less constrained by other people’s opinions. I have tried to do the things that I want to do and to do them to the best of my ability. I have focussed on things that I care about and think are important rather than those that the conventions of the tiny society I happen to live amongst deem to be important. On the other side of the coin I try to be more open-minded to the ways of others.

There is no normal. There is no perfect lifestyle. There is only a perfect way of life for you. The important thing is to work out what that is and then pursue it with relentless passion.

A version of this article first appeared in Lightworker magazine.

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