I’ve always thought of myself as a list maker and I believed that making lists was the best way to get shit done, even though I rarely managed to scratch more than two things off a list in a day. At the end of the day I’d look at a list with 5 or 6 things on it that I didn’t get around to and think, what the hell did I do with my time? Far out, I procrastinate too much. I really have to change that. So, the next day I’d write another list with renewed determination to get shit done, but I’d never make it to the end of the list, even though the things I had on there were only small tasks that wouldn’t take that much time or effort.  Ugh, what’s wrong with me? I’ll try harder tomorrow, then tomorrow would come, then another tomorrow, then another and rinse, repeat. My day was pretty much taken up by what I saw as not getting shit done. I’d never feel good about the things I did do because there was always more that I didn’t do.

This cool guy I’m married to came to live here after he quit his job working away in a remote location. I’d see him from time to time, but it’s been several years since we lived together all the time and I’d forgotten how focussed he is. He has this super-ability to accomplish all this amazing shit in one day. As soon as he got here, he started writing a daily list on the blackboard we have painted on the wall. Wow, he really is pretty damn cool, I thought to start with, but it didn’t take long until I started comparing myself to him and as a result became even less productive with my own list. “What’s the point of writing a list if you don’t do the things on it?” He asked me before skipping off to finish putting the guttering on the shed he’d just built.

Instead of pushing him off the ladder and burying his body in the 4 metre bore he’d just dug by hand I decided that maybe he was right and that just because I’d been telling myself I was list maker for as long as I can remember, doesn’t mean I am one. All at once I recalled all the past effort I’d put into lists, scheduling, planning, goal setting and how it just never worked: I hated it. The more I tried to force myself into a box the more I railed against it and the more it made me feel like a failure because like I said earlier I could only focus on what I wasn’t achieving instead of what I did achieve. I’ve been doing this for years. What an idiot!

My brain popped up and said, “Hey, what about a reverse to-do list?”

My mind said, “What’s that?”

“Well,” said my brain, “Instead of writing out shit that you want to get done, it’s where you write out the shit that you did get done. Kind of like a journal, but without the tears and emotional outpouring.”

So, I called it The Book of What I Did. I thought keeping all my daily achievements (even the mundane stuff like cleaning the bathroom) in one place would be a great way to see that even though I don’t get stuff done, I also get a lot of stuff done.  I feel pretty excited that I don’t have to look at a list anymore and think about how I hate everything on it.

Lists are still important. I mean, where would I be without my shopping list, or without my wish list on Booktopia? But by not having a daily to-do list I hope I can focus more on what I’m achieving rather than what I’m not achieving because:

Big achievements are made up of all the little ones, and as Paul Kelly said:

“From little things big things grow”

I’ve been hanging to try skating on the road for ages, but got scared about scratching up my roller derby pads (you can’t skate on wooden rinks with scratched pads because they wreck the floor when you inevitably fall over). I guess I could have gone without pads, but I was a bit scared about scratching up my elbows, knees and hands! So, I got some of this disgusting green felt stuff to stick on my pads to stop them getting wrecked. Great idea if you can fall on your pads instead of on your backside. I fell right on my arse in the first ten minutes! I know to fall forward, because that’s what I do at derby, but it’s really hard to overcome the repulsion of going face-first into the bitumen. My tail bone is still killing me!

So, I skated out along the road to the 2km turn around point and didn’t fall over again. Overall, I would have skated around 3km. Hot mix is definitely easier to roll on than the blue metal, but it’s also easier to get stuffed up on bits and pieces that sit on top of the hot mix. The wheels get caught on rock and sticks, but they roll right over them on the blue metal. It’s rough as guts though! I’ve got road wheels on my skates and the bearings are different to my rink wheels. They kind of freak me out because they spin more freely than my rink wheels.

It’s scary skating on the road. I’m always really worried I’m going to fall over. I’m very conscious of hurting my bony arse and hips, but I’m glad I did it. It was heaps of fun and next time I do it, I’ll be better than I was the first time I did it. If I keep it up, imagine how good I’ll be in a few month’s time. I’ll rock that shit!

It’s easy to give up if something is hard in the beginning, or if we’re scared. The problem with that is that ALL new things are hard (and sometimes scary) in the beginning. They’re hard because we’ve never done them before and it feels alien to engage in a totally new behaviour. Plus, most of us don’t like making mistakes because it gives us an icky feeling, but mistakes are how we learn, just like how I learnt that it’s easier to skate on blue metal than it is on hot mix, which was pretty much opposite to what I thought would happen before I tried it.

I don’t expect to ever be an expert at skating, although the idea is nice. My idea of being successful at skating is that I can do it without falling over and feel like I’m having an awesome time. If that’s my measure for success, well, guess what? I’m already smashing it!

Confidence isn’t something you can find out there. Confidence comes from taking action.

Adventure can do this.

The new job didn’t work out, but that’s ok because that’s what being adventurous is all about: finding stuff out about yourself and about the rest of the world, and using that new knowledge to forge a better and more exciting path.

I thought the job was really cool and I enjoyed the time I spent doing it. The other people were decent guys and I liked the camping aspect of it. I just couldn’t cope with all the driving. I didn’t realise when I accepted the job that there was so much travel involved every week and once I’d given it a shot I just knew that I would have a lot of trouble coping mentally with that amount of time spent in a vehicle.

I’ve come away from this experience as a different person because it totally changed the way I see timber harvesting in Queensland. Previously I thought it to be an unsustainable practise that pretty much wrecked the entire landscape, but I am forced to admit that the stuff I saw wasn’t like that at all. It was quite the challenge to accept that the long-held ideas I’d had about forestry practices in this state weren’t always 100% correct. And, if I’m really honest, I actually can’t even recall where my original ideas about timber harvesting came from. I’d certainly never questioned them.

This experience has made me wonder what other ideas I’ve got that are childish,old, silly, wrong, expired, rank, stupid and just downright idiotic; ideas that could be holding me back, ideas that could be telling me that “I can’t”.

I could have seen this whole thing as a failure: I couldn’t cope with the travel, I wasted everyone’s time, I feel stupid and useless and blah, blah, blah, woe-is-me,  but I chose to make it matter, and not in a crappy way that would eat away at my soul for eternity, but in a positive way that will allow me to build awesomeness for the rest of my life. Bad shit happens, dumb shit happens, and good shit happens too. That’s just the nature of being alive, what you do with the shit that happens to you is what matters.

Making it matter is your choice

Today my adventure was suspending my unfounded belief that crowd funding is a load of crap and is only out to rip people off. Where do these crazy ideas come from! Anyway, I’m looking into hosting the Women’s’ Adventure Film Tour in Bundaberg and wanted to come up with a way to make the tickets more affordable. I tossed around a few ideas until a small voice said: crowd funding.

“Sounds dodgy,” I heard my mind telling my brain.

“Ugh, you again. Really? Don’t you know when to keep your trap shut? We both know you’re risk averse. I’m the boss here and I say we look into it,” my brain said.

After I bit of research I had to concede that I’d been a close-minded twerp. Oopsy! Crowd funding is in fact a legitimate way to get an event like this off the ground. I felt pretty good about learning some new stuff, not only about crowd funding, but about my own tendency to unconsciously absorb ideas from unreliable sources. In doing so I got a good ol’ pat on the back from my brain. This is the photo I took:

The film tour is an adventure in itself. I’ve never done anything like this before and it’s a huge project. If I can pull it off it’ll write on the wall of who I am. I like the sound of that. Crowd funding will be a great way for me to reduce the price of tickets down to almost nothing, which means that the event becomes a totally inclusive one, which is what I’m driving at with the whole adventure thing in the first place.