It would be pretty easy now at the age of 30 to just stay in the job and stay as everything is now for us: earning reasonably well; quite interesting jobs; decent lifestyles… Not rich but able to eat out every so often and go on the occasional holiday. So why can’t we be just content with the way things are; get a promotion every now and then, and stay in São Paulo? It’s comfortable enough, isn’t it? Why would we want to go and do something like this?
Well, it would be so easy, wouldn’t it? But a “quite interesting” and “decent lifestyle” which is “comfortable enough” just strikes me as a little wrong somehow. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all” – and that is how it feels at the moment: existing. The jobs are interesting but are ultimately everything feels the same, no matter how different a case feels. You get stuck into such a pattern that it feels like Groundhog Year, not just Groundhog Day, and before we know it, we will turn 40, got even more overweight and still doing the same thing. That is existing.
So, we come back to dreams and what happens to them all. Am sure that lots of us have childhood dreams of becoming a pilot; becoming a famous explorer; climbing mountains; sailing around the world. But what happen to these dreams? It would be interesting to see how many of us actually fulfil these dreams or let them fade to memories and have a few laughs when we look about how adventurous we use to be. Again, once we let slip into Groundhog Year, it is so easy to let these dreams slip and be content with being comfortable.
But why around the world; why the hard way and why make life difficult for yourself by including ridiculous challenges like Everest and cycling across Australia…?! Surely there are other ways to live your dreams? What about just doing something like going from the southernmost part of South America to the northernmost part of Canada? This would definitely be a challenge and not something to turn your nose up at. Not mentioning the fact that going around the world by land along the polar axis would be extremely interesting from the human and physical geography point of view, I guess it is the dream of getting to the Poles – following in the footsteps of those great early explorers; challenging ourselves to the extremes and going through some of the harshest conditions in the world to accomplish something incredible. We just need to remember that life can be more than just comfortable and that dreams can be realised no matter how young they were originally made. Realizing this, and following these dreams, escaping Groundhog Year… this would be living.
And if we can film, photograph and document the journey, and raise money for good causes in the process, then why not?
360 Extremes Expedition 