10 LESSONS I LEARNT ON THE ROAD

A friend asked me what these travels – 10-weeks across China, Indonesia, and Vietnam – had taught me about me.

As I took some rest – in my final stop – in Ho Chi Minh City, I came up with 10 lessons. 

1. Henry David Thoreau said, “All good things are wild and free,” and I tend to agree. Within me—and in the spirit of the traveller—I see this innate human desire to stretch, dream, and expand.

2. The space gifted by anonymity is an invitation to explore and express, unrestricted by insecurity or expectation. It is a gap that I have been working hard to close—owning the warts and the weirdness, and giving light to the wonder.

3. In the icy plains of adolescence, I internalised the mantra “I don’t dance,” but this was born of conformity, not authenticity. Dancing sober, in an arc of music, surrounded by other sweaty, flailing limbs—all unshackled from hesitation or the need for validation—is a source of genuine and simple joy. We are not a linear species.

4. My impulses and my well-being are interrelated—a dance between chicken and egg that creates either a spiral of discontent or a plateau of harmony. When I feel in fine order—as I have tended to on this trip—I reach less, or at least do so mindfully.

5. Like the ocean that I stare at so reverently, when nurtured by the right conditions, my natural state is calmness and clarity. Dysregulation and depression are signals of disconnection, and signposts back towards alignment.

6. Knowing the depths as I do, I feel proud of the ease I have reached in my own company. The banality of my diary entries is that of a man no longer incarcerated in his own mind. Liberation is not a state I ever take for granted, but as my gaps on parole become wider, my confidence grows with it, knowing that from this place, good, kind, and courageous decisions will be made.

7. I feel immensely grateful for everything I have. I love my homeland, my family, and my friends. For all the exotic intrigue of meeting a fruit bowl of humans, nothing replaces true friendship.

8. When we travel alone, our body—rather than our mind—tends to drive the car, and in that family dynamic, there is a whole lot less “Are we nearly there yet?”

9. When I live in a manner that is open to the world’s endless serendipity—as is the traveller’s way—I know also my own limitless potential. Each day, I remind the desire to shrink that you are only ever one “hello” away from a thrilling, perhaps even life-changing, story.

10. All the joy I find out in the world exists at home—because it lives within me.