Photo by Jakub Barcik

Ten years ago in the departure lounge of Brisbane International Airport, Mum gave me some advice.
As I prepared to board a plane on my first solo international trip she told me to always say yes to new experiences, and that I could figure out the details later.
While this came with the obvious caveats associated with parental advice to a seventeen-year-old (don’t do condoms and always use drugs etc), I took it to heart.
I have lived my life since attempting to find a balance between taking her advice too literally and finding myself in situations some foresight could have prevented or being over cautious and missing out on once-in-a-lifetime events.
I have just barely avoided being mugged in New York City because the new friends I had just met had disappeared between bars and I was walking around drunk and alone at 3am, and I’m sure there’s a handful of experiences I’ve missed or was unaware I could have been a part of.
But what good is it to live life remembering the lives others have lived?

Two days ago I was standing next to a lake on the Illecillewaet Glacier in central British Columbia.
I was naked and waiting for the clouds to part and the sun to shine to give some brief comfort from intense discomfort I was about to endure.
The water was about three degrees celsius and I’m pretty sure every inch (lol) of my body was aware of that.
It’s not that I’m a masochist, seeking pain for pleasure, but maybe I take the sight of every inanimate body of water as a challenge – just to see if I can.
And that’s not such an unusual aspect of the life of someone who might call themselves a traveller.
For me, as a tourist and as someone who loves a good story, if I can look at something and see something which sure as shit won’t be pleasurable, but will make for a good tale in the future you can be sure I’ll be getting involved.
Why else would we do these things if not for the fact we can share them?
And while jumping into that glacial lake, I’ll admit, was an attempt to live up to Mum’s advice of a decade ago, it was also to satiate the very 21st-Century need to share every piece of my life for online gratification.

As I write this I’m sitting alone in a bar as if I’m waiting for someone, but I’m not.
I’m alone and comfortable with that because as far as you know I could be waiting for a friend, a lover.
I’m scrawling on a notepad as I could be waiting on an interviewee; a subject of a career on indefinite hiatus.
And these hypothetical options bring me comfort amongst questions no one is asking.
And with that anxiety comes the physical awareness that, yes, I am sitting at a bar alone and what do I do with my feet they don’t reach the floor from this stool and is my arse hanging out and goddamn I don’t have enough hair to be out in public without a hat on.
Stupid vanity, always ruining my thoughtful introspection.

Herein lies social media’s saving grace; I can justify my existence simply by making every aspect available to engage and make envious anyone with working thumbs.
I can spew some inspirational bullshit accompanying a photo of myself atop a mountain like I was the first to summit it; and with each Instagram ‘like’ I’ll give myself another hour in bed the next day.
Maybe if I had a nicer arse leaving it to hang out on a webcam and posting it in a NSFW subreddit would validate me.
Maybe if I was prettier each of my followers would send me abusive messages and I could live my life by schadenfreude.
But on each hike, on each day mountain biking or canoeing or snowboarding or just getting the fuck outside to continue actually experiencing this online fodder I can still get lost in it.
Thanks Mum, I’m still figuring out the details.