That’s what the little voice inside my head said to me the other day: just keep going. The only trouble with that is that it kept saying it, over and over and by the time I didn’t want to “just keep going” anymore, it was too late to turn around, I really had no choice other than to just keep going.

I wanted to go for a walk. I didn’t plan on going for a huge walk. Maybe 12km at the most. I strapped on my 2kg ankle weights and my 1kg arm weights, filled up a 1.25L bottle of water and off I went through the national park on my way to the beach. I hadn’t been in there for ages, so I’d forgotten how dangerous it is: there are spiders everywhere. Big ones. With big fat abdomens. Horrible black legs. Dripping fangs. Sticky webs. Aaaarghhh!

I’d just settled into the rhythm of the walk and had forgotten that both my legs were carrying 2kg each. Admiring the bush all around me I started to relax and think nothing-type thoughts. Basically, I was having a fine ol’ time. Then I walked into a spider web. The world stopped and my heart jumped out of my chest. I let out a stupid yelp and began dancing around in a circle. I saw the thick guage of the web that was caught around the top of me and grabbed my hat and flung it to the ground. A giant black monster sat right on the bottom of the velcro tab; about a millimetre from where the back of my neck would have been when the hat was on my head. Still dancing, I yelped again when I saw it and had to force back tears. My mind said, “right, that’s it, let’s go back home.” Momentarily my brain, normally rational,  agreed as I stood there in stunned horror at the now 7-legged beast ambling its way back towards the bush. “Oh my god, that’s so disgusting, Oh my god, oh my god” I said as I watched it go, still forcing back tears while attempting to get my heart back into the right place in my chest.

It was an effort, but I picked up my hat (I felt like the hat itself had become contaminated with spider-malice), put it back on and just kept going with an out-loud running commentary: “That was so disgusting. I can’t believe that happened. Please, no more spiders. I don’t want to walk into anymore webs. No more.” I saw a few more webs, some strung across the track at face height, most with giant black monsters sitting in the centre. All of them ready to attack. They didn’t make me want to cry, but at each siting I felt a tiny urge to vomit as I ducked under their embrace.

I wanted to go back home, but I knew that soon enough I would forget my near-death experience with the spider as long as I just kept going, so I did. By the time I got to Burrum Point Campsite, which is where I’d originally planned to start back towards home,  I decided that I was invincible and that I should just keep going, so I did. It’s always the same with this type of scenario. I say to myself, “I’ll just go to the next bend.” Or, “I’ll just walk for 15 more minutes.” I need to pay more attention to thoughts that are prefaced with “I’ll just.” For example, “I’ll just walk over here, then I’ll just be dead because I just fell off a cliff because I just stayed out for 4 more hours than I planned and it just got dark so quickly that I just lost my footing and I just slipped to my death.”  Well, that might be an exaggeration, but certainly not impossible given my history of doing almost that several times in the past.

Anyway, so I just kept going and 3.5 hours later I was still walking. I felt like I was never, ever going to get home! I ended up walking 18km, which is the furthest I’ve walked with my arm and ankle weights. I got a bit sick towards the end of the walk because I didn’t take enough water with me and I got a bit of heat stress. I had to go to bed early. I felt like I had a hangover. What an idiot! Still, I saw it as an adventure because I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen when I left the house. I was able to overcome the spider incident and keep walking for 18km until I got back home even though I got a bit sick in the last 3km.

I get scared of a few things when it comes to adventure. Spiders are certainly one of them. Sharks too, but that’s ok because if I just keep going in spite of the things that scare me I can have an amazing an exciting life because adventure isn’t about not being scared, it’s about being scared, but doing it anyway because:

If you just keep going, you can do anything 

Today I went to a workshop. I paid for it. It wasn’t expensive, but still, I paid for it and when this happens I become very, very attached to extracting what I consider to be value from the experience. This kind of attitude has seen me sit through things that make me want to roll over and die. It’s caused me to read books that I hate, just because I paid for them, then feel pissed off because A) I wasted my money and B) I wasted my time.

Today I did a first. I left half way through the first day of a two day workshop because I hated it. There wasn’t anything wrong with the workshop necessarily, but I was bored because it was all stuff I’d covered a bazillion times before in a bazillion different kinds of ways at a bazillion workshops I’d gone to in the past or in a bazillion books and websites I’d read.

My mind kept telling me that I should stay, that maybe a new and important piece of information was just around the corner, but then my brain said, “yeah, just like the next spin will be the one that wins the jackpot.” I realised that my time is worth more than the money I paid for the workshop.

If I’m really honest, I’m a champion at procrastination and the workshop was another one of my avoidance tactics. I knew when I booked it that I didn’t really need to do this workshop, but I told myself a little story about why I did. The little story allowed me to delay doing the real work I’m meant to be doing: working on getting my memoir published. Click here for a short synopsis. The reason I want to avoid that is because I’m afraid. I’m afraid that it won’t be published and all my work and all the shitty stuff that happened to me that I wrote about in the memoir will all be for nothing, which means that no one gives a crap about me. But, worse and scarier still is what if it does get published? That means that everything, and I mean everything will change. That’s much scarier than living the same life that I have now; a life where I’m used to being a writer who no one wants to publish; a person whose life is insignificant and whose experience does not matter; a person who has incorporated feeling invisible into their identity. It’s shitty to feel like that, but it’s safe and I’m used to it because I’ve felt like this for a long time.

Sometimes I feel like I want to quit writing, just like I quit the workshop today, but for a totally different reason: to free myself from uncertainty. Adventure helps me cope with this because an adventure is an activity with an uncertain outcome. It involves risk, just like my writing does and it can bring vast and unexpected rewards, just like my writing can do. Sometimes I don’t know where an adventure will take me, and even if I have to pack it in and come home early (like when my tent snapped in half at a music festival during a storm), I don’t consider myself a quitter because I did my best and that’s all any of us can ever do.

Knowing when to quit is wisdom, not defeat

Yesterday I had a really bloody awesome day because I approached it with an attitude of adventure. I went to a morning with this bunch of people who get together once a month at the group leader’s house. Really, I didn’t want to go because often, these kinds of groups can be just be a bunch of people whinging about stuff that’s wrong with them. I find it really hard to cope with any kind of whinging, especially about physical ailments (I am not my brain injury and you are not your knee replacement) and my mind kept backing me up by saying, “No don’t go. It’ll be boring.” But then my brain showed up and started yelling and stomping because of these things called pancakes. “What the hell is wrong with you? Pancakes! They’re having pancakes! We’re going, I don’t care what you say.” With that, my brain went off to pack our own bottle of maple syrup just in case the group didn’t have any of their own. They did have their own; four bottles in fact, not to mention all the other awesome stuff like icecream, passionfrut, mango……ahhhhhhh. I got to drive a lot of pancakes into my face AND come home with a full bottle of maple syrup. Yay

It wasn’t really the pancakes that made the morning so enjoyable. It was the connections I was able to make with the other people there. I met a really cool lady who invited me along to another event that I wouldn’t have heard about had I not gone to the pancake gig. We had a really meaningful conversation about racism and I was forced to realise that I’d harboured a blanket-belief about people from her generation: they are nearly always racist. It’s really interesting to me that I don’t even realise that I have these judgements until they come along and wack me on the back of the head like this one did. After I got the wack I couldn’t really say why I’d thought that pretty much EVERYONE from a certain group would have certain thoughts. How the hell would I even know that?! What an idiot! No wonder people are racists – that’s pretty much what I’d been doing all along with my dumb idea about an entire generation. Does that make me a generationist? Is that even a word? Yes it is.

After the pancakes I went to see the Hillbilly Goats in Bundaberg. My mind kept telling me that we were too tired after all the pancakes, but my brain said, “Shutup you! There’s banjos. Are you listening? Banjos!” So I pulled on my boots and off I went. I was pretty impressed to see that the banjo player in the band and I had exactly the same doc martens with exactly the same red laces.  Yeah, I felt pretty cool!

The night was awesome! I got to bust some hillbilly moves with these ridiculous high kicks and heel-and-toe shenanigans that I’ve come up with by dancing alone in my lounge room (I love dancing, but no one will ever come out with me, so I jump around to Nick Skitz by myself at home). I also sat with a lovely lady I’d met once before at Woodford Folk Festival a couple of years ago and chatted to another dude about giving me banjo lessons.  There were a few things that would have normally got my goat (get it!), like some drunk dickheads falling all over the place in front of the band and just generally being annoying, but I didn’t let it get to me and for the first time ever, it wasn’t a giant effort. It was pretty cool and the whole day just come together in this magical way that made me realise that all the effort I put into making myself into a better person does actually make a difference. Taking responsibility for your life; your feelings, your beliefs and the way you respond to stuff isn’t easy at first, in fact, it’s downright painful, but if you keep at it, your life can become pretty damn amazing.

Have an attitude of adventure and see where it can take you