25: Learning to Adventure

The first part of travel is deciding to go. In Christopher Ross’s book Tunnel Visions he talks about his friend Graham, who lived for a time in the Baja desert near California. After returning Graham taught in an inner-city school and tried to inspire the kids to travelling themselves. They protested that they could not afford it even though Graham said he had only had £200 when he arrived in California. “‘They needed more imagination, not money’ said Graham”.

One of the clichés of travelling is the difference between tourists and travellers. It’s common in hostels and traveller cafes to hear people talking loudly about their adventures: who has travelled furthest and had the most authentic encounters. Some people seem to blunder into adventure – they can take a business trip and come back with a story to tell. Other people could spend a week at a music festival on the other side of the world and have nothing happen to them. There are skills to travelling.

Keith Johnstone’s book Impro is a fascinating guide to acting. Johnston talks about the way in which some people respond to scenes by opening them up and others shut it down, failing to take opportunities. For Johnston there are lessons here that can be applied far wider:

“People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding. A student objected to this view by saying, ‘But you don’t choose your life. Sometimes you are at the mercy of people who push you around.’ I said, ‘Do you avoid such people?’ ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘I see what you mean.”

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