With all cafes closed, I ate a tub of the curry I’d made last night, drank a flask of coffee, and asked myself about coming back to the ‘normality’ after adventures…

(I’ve also written about this topic here.)

*

You know that feeling when you return from a long, muddy run? One of those where you get so lost that it goes on for an hour extra and becomes a bit of an epic. Eventually you find your way home, get warm again and then fall into the soft, familiar, welcoming world of your sofa with a bucket of tea, a loaf of toast, and Test Match Special on the radio.

You have earned the right to lie on your sofa. You replay the satisfying memories from the run. You’re proud of yourself. But you feel absolutely no compulsion to get up and run any further. That is what coming home from an adventure feels like. 

For many years I held the erroneous hope that just one more adventure — a really big one — and I would at last heave Excalibur from the stone and feel content like this for ever…

Alas, not yet…

And, I suspect, not ever.

Embarking on an adventure is like opening Pandora’s Box. A whole new world of possibilities bursts forth. For the rest of your life you’ll have new benchmarks for things like “fun”, “excitement”, “simplicity”, “purpose”. This is magnificent, of course. There is a wonderful world out there waiting to be explored. But it can also make things tricky!

(I note that I have mentioned Pandora’s Box in a dozen posts on my blog and probably half a dozen books!)

*

Unfortunately I don’t derive much long-term satisfaction from completing journeys. The endings are exquisite, certainly: the long-dreamed-of holy trinity of hot shower, cold beer, soft bed never ceases to feel absurdly wonderful! But sooner or later the gloss fades. Nobody knows the distant places I have returned from, places that sometimes leave me me a step-removed from the people in my life, a little more distant.

Having worked so hard during the adventure, devoting such energy towards one simple (but not easy) goal, it feels disjointed to suddenly cross a finish line, stop, have a cup of tea, and then think, “now what?” The new lack of direction can lead to a feeling of aimless drift. The web of complicated purposes and objectives that make up real life may appear more diffuse and pale (and also more difficult and less self-gratifying) than the one mad mission you had been focussed on.

*

Fulfilling an ambition and achieving something that feels personally momentous does not necessarily guarantee lifelong happiness. On Desert Island Discs cyclist Sir Bradley Wiggins talked about the comedown after winning the Tour de France or Olympic gold.

“I’d achieved this thing… and it was like, “what do I do now?” It doesn’t feel how I thought it was going to feel.”

If being restless, questing, ambitious and unsettled is what pushes me out the door in the first place, completing journeys only makes it worse! The crux of the whole issue is that, “no matter where you go, there you are.” If you can deal with this, you’ll be halfway there, and far ahead of many people I know, myself included!

*

My years of searching led me to paradise. Then they led me right back to where I began in the first place. Yes, there have been some cracking adventures, but I hadn’t found the Meaning of Life or the elixir of happiness along the way. And, after an extraordinary experience, an ordinary life can be stifling and frustrating.

If you struggle with real life and so take yourself off on an adventure in pursuit of excitement, a life less ordinary and all the rest of it, then you’re unlikely to fare well if you return home, declare yourself fixed, pull on a suit and tie and take yourself off to be a civil servant in the hope that real life’s going to work out just fine for you now.

Too often I compare my normal days to those salad days of big adventures. Seen through that dazzling prism my everyday highs, my fitness, my prospects, my freedom and independence, my normal everyday levels of contentment and satisfaction can struggle to live up to those benchmarks. It is not all doom and gloom at all; rather I just set myself higher standards now for measuring my life.

If you want an interesting life, go on a huge adventure, by all means. But I wouldn’t necessarily advocate that path if you’re looking for a contented life or to solve a feeling of restlessness in your life. As the old curse cautions, “May you live in interesting times…”

*

When I am away on trips I appreciate and value the importance of community and continuity. As I get older these things, and the rooted, hefted stability that goes with them, are becoming larger parts of my thinking overall, thank goodness.

But sadly — and I am neither happy nor proud to write this — after tasting the freedom of solitude, the intensity of trust and companionship, the beauty and self examination of wild landscapes, the abundance of time and space, the focused purpose of striving for a goal, the intense appreciation of luxury that is a warm sleeping bag in a frozen place or a cold mountain stream on a hot day, the moments of living on my wits, the adrenaline and terror of sinew-straining effort, spoon-licking frugality or the heady abundance of camping beneath a laden avocado tree… After these experiences I sometimes find parts of normal life almost too boring, too banal to bear.

I know that not every ‘adventurer’ feels this way. I know that much of my response to the ordinary world is my chosen fault and self-destructive. But that is just my tale.

Adventurers. We may look like bums. We may dress like bums. We do many things that bums do and we wish that we were bums. But actually most of those who go off in pursuit of the expedition life are very unlike bums. We are hardworking, driven, ambitious, conscientious — like good civil servants — but also restless, impatient, and somewhat full of ourselves. Therefore there are many similar iterations of the story I am writing, including:

• Cal Major
• Anna McNuff
• Emily Chappell
• Sarah Outen
• Ben Dave
• Beau Miles
• Dave Cornthwaite and also this.
• Ben Saunders
• Tim Moss
• Juliana Buhring
• Kevin Shannon

*

I think being a ‘working adventurer’ does not help with the pursuit of peace after adventures. If, for example, I now became a Doctor I suspect that the memories of my adventures could rest as happy ornaments on the mantlepiece of my mind.

But because I tell the same tales time and again to pay the bills there is no closure to a story (only dilution and simplification). And, rightly or wrongly, I have always measured my self worth (and my actual business worth) on the strength of my next adventure. So I often worry that my life has peaked.

Far too often the question ‘what next?’ weighs on me like a millstone rather than being an exciting scent of things to come.

*

But what about the solutions to the problems of life after adventures? Solutions are always more interesting!

I take all my experiences and lessons and memories and try to use them for good and useful work, and above all to be a good parent and friend. I remind myself that, although a tent on a mountain top is very appealing, “one cannot live any longer without poetry, colour and love.” 

More than anything else, Microadventures have been the solution. For the adventures themselves, but also for teaching me to choose to see the positives and the opportunities in every situation. 

The regular, short, local, cheap little microadventures I squeeze around the busy rhythm of my ordinary life have often restored my joy, enthusiasm, curiosity, and spirit of adventure over the past decade.

And if you don’t have time to sleep on a hill (in which case, by the way, you need to make the time to sleep on two hills), then a lunchtime tree climb goes a wee step in the same direction as crossing a glacier in Iceland: it’s still adventuring under the wide and wild sky.

*

I finished my coffee, put away my notebook and my musings, and climbed back onto my bike. I plugged in my earphones and hit ‘shuffle’. Music has the surgical knack of slicing through your memories to precise moments in your life. Whoosh! I’m under a bridge, somewhere in central Japan.

Soaked to the bone, still skinny and weary from a winter in Siberia. Nothing but grey concrete. Pylons. The neon lights of indecipherable Japanese shop signs. I sigh, shiver, and plug in my earphones. I rarely listened to music when I cycled round the world: I had only a dozen MiniDiscs and chances to recharge my AA batteries were rare. So I only allowed myself the escapist delight when I was either really happy or really struggling.

That gloomy afternoon under the bridge, somewhere south of Tokyo, I click in the new MiniDisc I’d been given. I press play and begin to ride. As always, my pace picks up with the beat, my weariness pushed to the back of my mind. I’m riding a straight road through endless rice fields, zipping through puddles and transfixed by the story-telling cleverness of A Grand Don’t Come for Free by The Streets. The drama of Mike and Simone and his missing thousand quid unfolds as I pelt through the rain, grinning and whooping at the sheer bloody wonder of being on the far side of the world and free as a bird. What a magical privilege a long adventure is!

There’s nothing particularly special about that song; it just happened to be the first one that played. Any number of other tunes would have transported me to the lands of so many different memories.

Now, years later, on this cold, blue spring day in England, I understand that the joys of my past adventures still smoulder within me. They bring me happiness when memories like this reappear. And music and bikes and the freedom of the open road will always fill my very soul with joy, even here — just an hour or two’s ride from home.

I put The Streets onto shuffle, whoop, and hammer homewards down the winding country lanes to the sound of Weak Become Heroes, a song recalling the dizzy heights of younger years. The newness, the wonder, the exaggerated polish of those precious memories. (For Mike Skinner that meant mid-90s rave culture!)

These days I am living the second half of the song: years have gone by and we are older, looking back. My life’s been up and down since those days but — mirroring the song — I end with the feeling that the stars have aligned, we all smile, and we all sing.

These are good times too, even without my big expeditions of old. And they are good times made even better by all those memories that Pandora’s Box has filled me with along the way.