Tag: travel

Are you ready to leave lockdown?

For most of us, Covid-19 has radically shifted our day-to-day context: our work environment, social milieu, shopping and even our sleeping habits.

I think the most striking change for me has been stability.

I’ve spent the 74 nights of lockdown in Bournemouth. I haven’t stayed in one place for anywhere even close to 74 nights since my records began in July 2015. For those of you (hi) who love the stats, these are my longest sojourns over the past five years:

  • 2019: 22 nights (Bristol)
  • 2018: 23 nights (Bristol)
  • 2017: 23 nights (Peckham)
  • 2016: 27 nights (Edinburgh Festival)
  • 20 July-December 2015: 25 (New Cross)

At least once every four weeks for the last five years I have been on the move, travelling across the country for work or to visit friends, or further afield on overland adventures.

Without lockdown, I don’t think I ever would have realised how much I travel—and the possible advantages of stability.

With a rocksteady context, I’ve been able to build consistent habits like never before. With no interruptions to my developing routines, I’ve seen improvements in both my work and rest.

As I explored with my special content for donors last week, harnessing the almost unimaginable power of our habitual second self can be a tremendous boon to our productivity and our happiness.

So, before we rush headlong out of lockdown, I think it’s worth pausing and asking ourselves a few other questions about how our lives have changed and what we might be able to salvage for the future.

52 questions to answer before leaving lockdown

Readers of this newsletter come from all over the world, from extremes of both the World Clock and the Covid-19 infection scale.

It seems like the UK is slowly shaking itself off and starting to pick up old habits. But perhaps you are only now battening down the hatches, perhaps you have already returned to some semblance of work and play.

Wherever you find yourself, the idea of these questions is to build up a picture of your life under lockdown, to reflect on how your context has moulded your behaviour and, perhaps most importantly, to ponder on what and how you would change for the future.

I’ve split the 52 questions into 9 sections:

  • Daily habits
  • Your context
  • Health
  • Relationships
  • Work
  • Consumerism
  • Citizenship
  • The future
  • Noticing

I’m not going to even suggest that you sharpen your pencils and set aside three hours; this isn’t an exam. Feel free to let the questions wash over you as you read, and simply notice what bubbles to the surface.

Daily habits

  • How do you start your day? List the first ten things that you do. Have these changed since lockdown? Can you see any room for change or adaptation?
  • How do you end your day? List the last ten things you do. Have these changed since lockdown? Can you see any room for change or adaptation?
  • Think about a typical day in lockdown. What are you doing regularly now that you wouldn’t have done before Covid-19? What old habits have fallen away?
  • Is there anything you miss from your old life? Why do you miss these things?
  • What activities have been most important to your mental health over the past three months? Have these become habits? Would you keep them or adapt them?

Your context

  • Where have you been spending most of your time?
  • Name at least three things that you appreciate about where you’ve been staying.
  • Think about your best habits. How could you adapt your home environment so that it better supports your best habits?
  • Think about your worst habits. How could you adapt your home environment so that it inhibits your worst habits?
  • What places outside your home have been particularly important to you over the past three months?
  • How have your travel habits changed? What modes of transport are you using now? Has this made your life better or worse?

Health

  • How’s your physical health? How do you feel in your body?
  • How’s your mental health? How do you feel in your mind?
  • How have you been keeping fit? How would you change your exercise if you could magically do anything, with anyone?
  • How are your sleep patterns? Better or worse? Earlier or later? Regular or irregular? Are you napping? Dreaming?
  • Have your eating habits changed at all? What’s your diet like? Are you eating more, less or the same? Where are you when you eat? What are you doing while eating? What food has been particularly important you over the past three months?
  • How’s your oral hygiene?

Relationships

  • How have your relationships with others changed?
  • Have you formed any new friendships? Or rekindled old friendships?
  • Have you been using any new forms of communication? Would you keep them or adapt them to the new context?
  • How has your relationship to yourself changed?
  • Who are you speaking to the most? Who has been particularly important for your mental health over the last three months?
  • Who have you been neglecting?
  • Is there anyone—you don’t have to know them personally—that you’d like to say thank you to? Or say sorry to?

Work

  • How has work changed for you over the past three months? Are you working more, less or the same?
  • How are your working days organised now? How is that different to before?
  • Has anything changed at work, either in what you’re doing or how you’re doing it? If yes: do you want to keep, adapt or develop these changes?
  • What part of your work or business has disappeared? Do you want or need it back?
  • What is important or essential about your work? Can you uncover or emphasise these elements in the future?
  • Are there any educational opportunities you’d like to arm yourself with for the future?
  • What might your working future be like? In a disaster scenario? And in a perfect world? What can you do to start making those futures a reality?

Consumerism

  • How have your shopping habits changed?
  • Have you bought more or less than you used to? If that’s a hard question to answer, look at the raw numbers: have you spent more or less?
  • Can you remember how you used to shop and spend money? Would you like to go back to those days? Would you rather keep or adapt your new shopping habits?
  • What possessions have been particularly important to you over the past three months?
  • Are there any possessions that you thought were essential, but haven’t even thought of using since lockdown?
  • What clothes have you been wearing most?

Citizenship

  • Do you feel more or less a part of society?
  • What’s most important for the healthy running of our society? What’s the significance of being a citizen in our society? What role does government, both local and national, have to play in our society? How would you like to participate?
  • If you could change one thing about our society, what would that be? Could you take one small step today to help make that change a reality?
  • What have you learned about your neighbours? About your local area? Who are the key workers for you? What are the most important businesses?

The future

  • What’s the first thing you’d do if you were allowed to travel and meet people freely?
  • What’s important to you this coming summer or winter? What are your three highest priorities?
  • What are you most worried about as you emerge from lockdown?
  • Think about how you felt as the news filtered in about the deaths in China, the arrival of Covid-19 in your country and the announcement of lockdown measures. How did your past self feel about all this uncertainty at the time? How do you feel towards your past self now? How do you think your future self will handle future uncertainty?
  • What areas of life do you think you’re handling well during lockdown?
  • What do you think you could have done better? How? Can you think of anyone who you thought managed those problems particularly well? What could you learn from them? If you’re not sure: ask them.
  • Do you feel more or less resilient and ready for the future? No matter what your answer: why do you think you feel this way? What steps could you take to feel more sure-footed?

Noticing

  • What have you noticed about the changing seasons? The weather, the trees, the birds, the plants? The smells, the sounds, the colours, the growth?
  • If you look after household pets or plants: what have you noticed about their lives during lockdown?
  • What scents have been particularly important to you during lockdown? What sights? What sounds? What tastes? What other sensations?
  • What music, art and literature has been particularly important to you during lockdown? Why?

My answers…

Don’t panic, I’m not really going to bore you with my laborious answers to all 52. But I will finish the one I started to answer at the top, about the changes in my immediate environment.

As well as spending 74 consecutive nights in one place, I’ve also taken an equally unheard of zero train journeys.

In the 10 weeks prior to lockdown I took 21 rail journeys, spending a little over £40 and 5 hours on trains every week.

This is remarkably consistent with my travel habits across the whole of 2019, when I took 2.5 journeys and spent £40 on trains for every week I was in the UK.

Nice stats, but what have I learned?

  1. My train travel is a change of context. The way I travel is not like commuting from one familiar context to another; it’s more disruptive than I thought.
  2. Changing context so frequently is harmful to my habits, which thrive in stability. For example: a late train back from London interrupts my evening routine. Interrupted evening habits means worse sleep, which means a less productive morning and a drop in my sense of wellbeing.
  3. I have a new respect for habits. My work habits are the rockbed of my productivity, as my health and fitness habits are of my wellbeing.
  4. Therefore I should be more careful about how and when I travel, particularly when I can’t or don’t want to take a break.

The case for creative stability

There are quite a few things I wouldn’t change about my lockdown life and travelling less frequently is one.

Without long train journeys to disrupt my daily and weekly routines, my second self does all the heavy lifting: automatically preparing for work, systematically feeding, clothing and watering myself, habitually letting my fingers fly over the keyboard for hours on end.

In turn, this easy automation of the second self gives time and space for my executive self to do what he does best: creative direction.

As William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology (1890):

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

With little variation in my 24 hours, a surprising amount of writing work has been possible. Knowing now the benefits of creative stability, I will think twice about how and when I surrender the environment in which my second self thrives best.

Of course, I’ll still travel—if only to slow down time a little. Without changes in context, the days blur into each other and our perception of time condenses forgettably.

Routine might make us more productive and more content, but it sure as hell doesn’t make for great stories!

~

I know that I’ve been very lucky with my lockdown so far, but I hope that you’ve also discovered something interesting about your daily life.

I also hope you’ve found these questions worthwhile and have enjoyed taking a moment to think about where we are now. I’d love to hear from you if you’d like to share any of your findings.

Finally, if you know anyone who might also enjoy these questions, feel free to share the post. Thanks!

The Next Challenge Grant: Applications for Adventure Now Open

For the past two years, I’ve supported The Next Challenge Grant, a wonderfully simple idea to crowdsource donations from people like me so that impecunious adventure-newbies can take on the kind of challenges that I’ve been so lucky to enjoy over the years.

My £200 donation – enough to fund one adventurous grantee – is dedicated to my nan. This is the dedication I wrote on the grant’s donor page:

My first big adventure, cycling 4,000 miles around the coast of Great Britain, was only possible thanks to support from my nan. She’d absolutely love The Next Challenge Expedition Grant so now it’s my turn to help you find your own awesome adventure. As nan used to say: Do it while you can!

This rest of this post was written by Tim Moss, the founder of the grant. Read on for the incredible stories of some astonishingly imaginative adventures made possible thanks to donations from the general public, people like you and me.

5 years, 60 adventures funded

Here’s a look back over five years of the Next Challenge Grant and the 60 adventurers that have won it…

We’ve had plenty of running expeditions like George Shelton running the Isle of Man ‘TT’ route, Dan Keeley running a thousand miles from Italy to England, Tina Page running the UK Three Peaks and Amanda McDonnell running across the Channel Islands.

Mike Creighton is running between all of the UK’s national parks as I write, while Ruth Thomas is preparing to run the Thames Path and Valerie Rachel is preparing to run the Trans-Labrador Highway.

Cycling’s been just as popular. Mikey Bartley rode up the legendary Alpe d’Huez eight times in a row, Dylan Haskin went round Costa Rica on a beach cruiser (sounds cool, looked brutal), Megan Cumberlidge bikepacked the GR247 and Geraint Hill explored “Everyman’s rights” in Scandinavia.

Karl Booth pedalled 2,500 miles to the top of Europe, off-road and then declined to accept any money from the grant. He said that he got so much sponsorship after telling people he’d won a Next Challenge Grant that he didn’t need the cash and I should give it to someone else. Legend.

Paddle sports have featured too. Graham Clarke tackled the Shannon on a home-made raft, Val Ismaili kayaked through Kosovo and Albania on the Drin, Anna Blackwell kayaked from the UK to the Black Sea, Jo Laird paddled the longest lakes in England, Scotland and Wales, Joanne McCallum paddled the longest lake in North Ireland, and Emily Fitzherbert and her daughter Lua paddle-boarding every lake in the Lake District.

There have been a few trips that combine sports too, like Heather Jones’ Welsh Three Peaks by bike (which ended in a snow-covered bivouac), Hajo Spathe’s home-made IronMan triathlon in the Rockie Mountains and Ed March-Shawcross’s triathlon around Arran.

We’ve let youth do it, with teenagers walking the Tour du Mont Blanc, canoeing the Rivey Spey, cycling across Europe, cycling across Jamaica, walking all of the UK’s National Trails, hiking from the Lakes to the Dales, and crossing a desert island.

We’ve had some really creative ideas, like Carmen Bran camping out for 100 nights in a year (around finishing a PhD), Oli Warlow climbing up and cycling between every route in the Classic Rock guide book, Nick Stanton cycling the length of the Berlin Wall on a hired bike, Joshua Powell running a marathon at Marathon (in ancient Greek armour) and Kate Symonds-Joy cycling to the northernmost point in the UK to perform a one woman opera in a lighthouse (!).

There are also plans to cycle the Netherlands in search of new food technologies, explore the worst-selling Ordnance Survey map, trek around Scotland with a pony and complete swimming escapes from the UK’s three prison islands.

Despite the grant being aimed primarily at smaller challenges, some expeditions have just been straight-up epic, like Jenny Tough running across the Kyrgyz Tien-Shan mountain range, Thommo Hart walking the length of South Africa barefoot and Elise Downing running five thousand miles around the UK (five thousand!). Plus, Sam Hewings is walking a couple of thousand miles along Britain’s watershed right now.

We’ve had expeditions all across the world too, with bikepacking in the Philippines, a circumnavigation of Gotland, a planned walk up Mount Cameroon, a father and young daughters walking in the Indian Western Ghats, a winter hike along the Great Wall, a trek along Ukraine’s Tendrivska Spit, Robin Lewis walking Japan’s tsunami-affected coastline, walking the length of New Zealand and a crossing of the Kolyma mountain range in the Russian Far East.

But we’ve also had plenty of trips closer to home, like Nate Freeman’s wonderfully simple walk to work (25 miles each way), Kerry Anne Mairs’ five bothies with a five year old, Bex Band taking a kick-scooter around the London Loop, Ben & Jude tackling the Caledonian canal in an inflatable boat, and Emily Woodhouse battling up every tor in Dartmoor.

The stories from these adventures would be enough on their own but the fact that they come from “normal people” who have been part-funded by “normal people” somehow makes them feel even better.

2020 grant applications now open

Applications for the 2020 Next Challenge Grant are now open. The deadline is Sunday 5th January. Read more and apply here.

It is open to people all over the world, of any age, nationality or background. Expedition experience is not necessary and, in fact, the grant is aimed squarely at those who are new to the adventure world and “don’t normally do this sort of thing”.

So if you’ve had a look at trips above and thought “I’m not the kind of person that does stuff like that”, then you need to apply.

The application only takes five minutes and – because Tim only has a small readership and typically makes 10 or more awards – the odds of success are high.

What are you waiting for? What is the worst that could happen?

Click here to apply

Click here to donate

The Memory of Adventure

Ask me how I’ll remember 2018 and I won’t say ‘typing words into a computer’, even though that’s how I spent far too much of almost every single day.

Not all of that typing was unmemorable, of course. Writing the second series of Foiled was fabulous and I’m sure I’ll be writing about how I believe in creativity soon.

But these are the memories that stand out most in my mind from this past year:

  • Bothying in the snow-bound Cairngorms
  • Travelling around Greece, meeting with refugees
  • Cycling 1000 miles with Thighs of Steel
  • Hiking in the Brecon Beacons

In a word: adventures.

Adventure is a big word, of course. But the choice is deliberate.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, adventure is:

  • A course of action which invites risk
  • A perilous or audacious undertaking the outcome of which is unknown
  • A daring feat or exploit
  • A remarkable or unexpected event, or series of events, in which a person participates as a result of chance
  • A novel or exciting experience

Personally, I like the roguish simplicity of this definition: A wild and exciting undertaking (not necessarily lawful).

But who defines risk, peril, audacity, daring, expectation, novelty and excitement? We do. Adventure is relative and I’m claiming it for myself.

The events that are most memorable from my year are the adventures, those moments when I made an audacious move to go beyond the limits of my comfort, surrendered to novelty, and invited risk and chance.

But there is nothing in any of those definitions that limits moments of adventure to epic bike tours through foreign lands, climbing mountains and sleeping in cold huts.

So this year’s adventures also include meeting my new niece, a family reunion, applying for a job, learning how to throw a Frisbee, talking to people in saunas, and breathing deeply.

Audacity, daring, novelty and wild excitement are opportunities we can dig up anywhere, at any moment. At any moment, we can stretch out our lives like vellum and print them with memories of adventure.

Do you not feel like you live an adventurous life? Are you sure? Don’t you ever feel challenged? Don’t you ever worry that things won’t turn out, and thrill when they do? Don’t you ever see things you’ve never seen before, or talk to unexpected strangers?

Well, go on then, here, take this word – adventure!

Adventure isn’t only for polar explorers and hitmen. We can have it for ourselves.

Further Adventures

  1. Professional adventurer Alastair Humphreys reading Seneca Letter 28: On travel as a cure for discontent. A beautiful reading, set to a beautiful video. ‘Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.’
  2. The Most Interesting Country in the World: Part 1 (10 minute read) ‘At home, our comfort zone is vast, like a great big sofa, sucking us in to watch endless re-runs of Miss Marple, where the Toff murderer always gets his or her comeuppance and order is restored in the form of a pillow-dribble nap.’
  3. What Makes a Person Do a Thing? (12 minute read) ‘It seems extraordinary, but we do get scared of our power, we do fear our greatness; we sometimes feel like we don’t deserve such responsibility, or we feel like imposters when we do presume to act.’

How travel works on the mind

If ever you feel that life isn’t quite lining up, or that your blood isn’t quite circulating as it should, or that you haven’t seen or smelt or heard anything different in a while, take a trip out of your front door and ask strangers how you can help.

That’s what I’ve been doing this past week. Continue reading How travel works on the mind

London to Greece via Paris, Milan and Brindisi with (but not by) a bike

Travelling by bike is a dream, travelling with a bike is goddam nightmare – if (like me a week ago) you don’t know what you’re doing.

This is a recollection of my ‘with bike’ journey from London to Patras in Greece, via Paris, Milan and Brindisi. The trip took 5 hot days in July 2018, encompassing 3 trains through France and Italy, and 1 ferry across the Adriatic. Along the way, I got to see plenty of Paris, a little of Milan, and probably too much of Brindisi’s gelaterias!

Before I left, I searched everywhere for information about travelling across Europe with a bike and, although I found plenty of Official Rules,  I couldn’t find anything like this – a straight-forward guide written by a cyclist who’d actually been there and done it.

I was pretty stressed on this journey simply because I didn’t know how much to trust the Official Rules – will Eurostar mistakenly send my bike to Brussels? will there be enough space on the TGV in among justifiably irate commuters? will my bike bag be 12cm too long? and will I be sent directly to jail without passing go by an over-officious guard?

Hopefully this guide will ease your troubled mind because this journey IS EASILY DONE. Continue reading London to Greece via Paris, Milan and Brindisi with (but not by) a bike

No No Aeroplanes: 98 Months and Out

I last took a flight in January 2010. I was still in my mid-to-late 20s, of no fixed abode (no change there) and had only been taking writing seriously for a year. I didn’t own a bicycle, had never worn a beard or grown my hair, and knew Cairo better than I knew any town outside London and my county of birth. Continue reading No No Aeroplanes: 98 Months and Out

Why does society need people who go on crazy, stupid, arduous adventures?

My friend Simon Moore is doing something crazy, stupid and arduous.

With Maria Gallastegui, he is sailing in a sixteen-foot dinghy over three thousand miles, from London to Lebanon.

It’s hard to capture quite how crazy, stupid and arduous this is unless you’ve done something similar, which I haven’t. And that’s kind of the point of this article.

Within about five minutes of us waving Simon and Maria off back last July, they discovered that their boat had holes in.

Then they discovered that, actually, waves could get pretty big in the North Sea and, if they capsized now, they’d be dead.

It took them four days, beaten back each time by gales and high seas, to get around just one point in Kent. Then they faced the Channel crossing.

Limping into Calais port, more coastal storms “encouraged” them to change their plans, from sailing around the Atlantic coast, to navigating through France along the canals.

That change of plan meant, rather than filling their sails, they faced instead months of back-breaking rowing.

Some days, Simon told me, he didn’t want to eat or drink anything because he didn’t have the strength to build a fire.

When he left, Simon thought the whole journey might be over in six months. Six months later, like Odysseus returning from Troy, Maria and Simon face an Odyssey that might take years.

Simon has now returned to the UK for the winter, to recover and take stock, waiting for the better Mediterranean sailing conditions of spring.

He is also thinking of giving up.

When he told me this, I was shocked. Shocked, a little panicky and then confused.

I could understand why he would give up; as if the journey wasn’t dangerous enough, the spread of the Syrian civil war into Lebanon makes even the destination deadly.

Any sensible, rational algorithm would calculate risk, profit and loss and conclude abandonment of the project.

I could understand his doubts and his concerns and could not blame him for such a decision.

So why did I feel shock, panic and confusion? Why should I take his retirement personally?

Because, I realise, I was relying on Simon’s journey.

Facing down my personal daily struggles – publishing a book, fixing my bike, taking clothes to Calais – relied in some small way on knowing that he was out there doing something far more crazy, stupid and arduous.

And I realised that, as a society, we need people like Simon and Maria, sacrificing themselves to do crazy, stupid and arduous things.

Why? The Philosophy of Inspiration

The process of doing anything starts in your imagination, with the conception that it is possible.

Without the imagination, there can be no action.

That’s why the most reliable indicator of whether you’ll end up as a doctor is if someone in your family is… a doctor.

This is also one reason why rich or privileged folks are more likely to embark on ambitious projects: thanks to their elite education and lineage, they have witnessed that anything is possible.

They have an arrogance of potentialities; they do not doubt what they are capable of.

Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of the charity Kids Company, remembers as a child hearing her grandfather and uncles talking about setting up the biggest ski resort in the world. Within a month, they’d started.

Camila grew up with that as a model: You dream something up and then make it happen.

Camila had written the business plan for Kids Company by the time she was fourteen.

The charity now helps 36,000 of the most vulnerable children in the UK with practical, emotional and educational support.

It wouldn’t have been possible – it wouldn’t have been even imaginable – if she hadn’t had her family’s lineage of imagination and action behind her.

You can’t do anything of which you can’t conceive; nor can you do anything you believe is impossible.

Camila Batmanghelidjh believed she could set up Kids Company because she’d experienced as a child that such things were possible.

I never considered a career in medicine because I had no conception that such a career was possible for me. I had no role models so it just wasn’t on my radar.

It might be illustrative to demonstrate how imagination turns into action with an example from my own life.

The Genealogy of an Adventure

Until 2009, I had no lineage of grand cycling adventures in my life. Bicycles were annoying machines that rusted in the garage and occasionally used to cycle two miles into town.

I had no conception that anyone could use them for adventures. My imagination for cycling extended as far as Wallingford and that was about it.

My parents did travel widely before I was born, hitch-hiking to Australia in the 1970s.

On Sunday evenings at home, to a soundtrack of Peruvian panpipes, they’d often show slides of their adventures in South America, my sister and I gazing in awe from the sofa.

But I didn’t connect cycling with such adventures until I stumbled across Alastair Humphreys at the Royal Geographical Society’s Explore Conference in 2008.

Alastair had recently finished cycling around the world, which is about as extreme a demonstration of the adventuring possibilities of the bicycle that you could hope for.

That conference marked the beginning of my imaginative lineage for cycling adventures.

The next year, I cycled to Bordeaux, followed by trips around Britain and then around Tunisia.

Each time, I stretched my imaginative conception of what was possible on a bicycle. As my imagination grew, I burst with new ideas and, gradually, I became able to turn those ideas into realities.

But none of my journeys would have been possible without the imaginative lineage I inherited from my parents and from Alastair Humphreys.

The Ripples of Transformative Stories

As a society, we need people like Alastair, Simon and Maria to do these crazy, stupid, arduous things because they are the ones who stretch our imagination and our conception of what is possible.

Everyone who comes into contact with Simon’s story now understands that such an audacious adventure is within their grasp.

Hearing Simon’s story forces us to confront an alternative reality, an alternative way of doing things.

We can’t ignore Simon’s journey precisely because it is crazy, stupid and arduous. It is a challenge to ourselves to overcome whatever struggles we are facing.

You cannot listen to Simon and go back to your life unchanged. He has given me the gift of an expanded imagination, an expanded reality, in the same way that my parents and Alastair Humphreys did.

Their stories are transformative; they force you to reconsider your conception of what you are capable of in life, in an instant.

That’s why journeys such as Simon’s are important to our society and that’s why I believe he should persevere.

Not for himself (although he will learn much from the journey), not for his charity Syrian Eyes (although they will benefit much from messages of solidarity and fundraising), but for the immeasurable millions of ripples his story will riffle through society.

Unbeknownst to him, Simon is transforming lives, opening minds, broadening imaginations. His arduous journey, his risking death, is not in vain; he offers us the gift of expanded imagination and a new perspective from which to examine our lives.

In this way, these kinds of journeys are a precious social service and it is a shame that they seem to be undervalued in our society.

Because their impact cannot be easily measured or monetised, these journeys are dismissed in value and left to people like Simon.

And people like Simon, if left without appropriate recognition of their positive impression on society, can get disheartened about their worth and think about giving up.

We must treasure these people; not worship, but treasure them. They do productive and inspirational work that is no less great for the fact that its impression is immeasurable.

Support them, share their experiences, spread their ripples. We need them.

I’m not saying that I’m going to rush off and sail to Lebanon, by the way, and I’m not saying that you should either. But I can never go back to believing that such a thing is impossible.

And, if sailing 3,500 miles in a dinghy is not impossible, then what else in my life is not impossible? What other potentials must I reassess? What else is my imagination capable of conceiving and making manifest?

We must not ignore or run from the audacity of our imagination. We must embrace it and surprise, delight and inspire the world.

UPDATE: Kids Company was dissolved in 2015 after the withdrawal of government funding and the support of major donors due to concerns over the charity’s financial management and a police investigation into allegations of child abuse.

A shocking denouement, but the story of the foundation of Kids Company is still illustrative of my point in this post. The police investigation found insufficient evidence of child abuse to meet the threshold for prosecution.