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.