Take The Long Way Round

Or, Life Is Choose Your Own Adventure, Sometimes Make An Adventure Of It

Despite playing up the idea of being a complete hermit, I go outside on occasion, and it’s quite an enjoyable experience. In fact, in recent years I’ve either taken up or will soon be taking up triathlon training, shooting, outdoor swimming and I really need to sort myself out on the photography front; I went out last weekend and took some photos of a horrific standard. So, we sort that out. But basically, I’ve been spending a lot more time outdoors. Add that together with the fact that my desktop is on its way out and I’m going to try and skip down a tax bracket by buying something a lot more expensive and a lot more portable, and we have the background for this little article.

I’ve written before about life being a choose your own adventure story before. I don’t mean that in a Peter Pan, you-can-do-whatever-you-want way. It’s just that the complexity of modern life lends itself to high optionality, (as well as higher risk.)

Naturally, you don’t want higher risk to involve your day-to-day life. Make earning money, having enough money and being healthy, (as well as low-drama relationships,) a main priority. Stress is a killer, and you want your everyday life to be as devoid of it as possible.

However…

We also want some adventure of the choose-your-own variety. Assuming all our ducks are in a row with the aforementioned life stuff, there are a lot of opportunities to do something more interesting that can change your life.

So, for instance, I’m off to some undisclosed location in Eastern Europe for a wedding in the summer. (This is assuming that WWIII doesn’t break out – but I didn’t include that in the RSVP.)

Now, I can fly direct and it’ll take just over three hours to get there. That’s what I probably will do.

But then, I looked into other options and found this:

I figured that rather than going by plane, I could see what the train routes are like. I love travelling by train; you get better scenery, you can sit and write, and ultimately it makes me feel like a Victorian gentleman in the days of the Empire. Which… some might find more distressing than I do, but we’re all unique.

Anyway, it turns out there are trains, ferries, trams, sleepers, and all sorts of other cool stuff, and once you start down the rabbit hole, you can go from my little village in Middle-of-Nowhere, England to St. Petersburg and beyond.

Don’t worry, I’m not making this a travel blog or anything. It’s just an extended analogy for how you can turn a simple journey into an adventure, and because this blog is concerned heavily with narratives and story, that should be an interesting analogy for you all.