What has happened to it all?
Crazy, some are saying
Where is the life that I recognize?
– duran duran

I was walking out of the Tescos in Holyhead, Wales. There was a police car in front of me, one of those tiny ones with the Cheap Trick paint jobs. I walked by it to the right hand drivers side of my rented white Vauxhall Astra. Adjusting my grocery bag in one hand I got the keys out of my pocket and hit the clicker. The Astra beeped back. I put the keys back in my pocket to free up my hand and open the door. I tossed my bag filled with sausage rolls & mars bars (see: The Penrhyn Mawr diet) in the back seat, and sat down behind the wheel. There with the door open, just sitting, surrounded by the muddle of traffic, voices and banging carts of an ordinary day and I thought… “How great is this!?”.

It’s way too easy these days to get lost in a flavorless ordinary life. It’s quite accidental really. We simply stop noticing. We stop noticing the amazing sunset slipping behind the hardware store. We don’t feel the warm wet breeze that that licks at our face to warn us of an oncoming storm while we put gasoline in the car on a late summer afternoon. We eat a burger because it’s quicker on our way home to veg in front of the TV. We feel tired. We lose our sense of sensuality. We run in out of the rain. It can’t be good. The trouble I think, is that we simply go numb over time. Like smokers lose their sense of taste. They don’t even realize it’s happening until years later someone asks how the meal was and they suddenly realize everything tastes like Styrofoam.

This brings to mind my short art college days when one day I was laboring away at reproducing an image of a tree from a photograph. It sucked. I mean, I could see I was drawing what was in the image, but my version seemed dead and lifeless. My instructor knew I was frustrated and one day he suggested I start over. He told me this time to turn my photograph upside down. I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d heard, but I played along and turned the photo on its head as requested. Then he simply said, “Draw it now.”, and walked away. Well, after a few moments it became obvious. Like staring at a magic eye book, I began to see what I was not seeing before. With the image right way up, I was drawing a tree. My brain knew what it was so it did not actually “see” the photograph. My drawing was a lifeless cliché representation of what I was looking at. I was not actually seeing the subject. I was for all intents and purposes, a blind man drawing a tree based on a description that I had memorized many years before. By simply turning it upside down, I was now able to see the lines, curves and textures again. The subject became unique and demanded my full attention. Now I could draw it. Not simply a “tree”.. but this one singular unique Maple lit up by late afternoon sun in front of a background tall snow covered hills.

This is one thing that is very important about travel, paddling trips or “expeditions” if you like. It’s not only that you see new things, but that by surrounding yourself with a new environment, even a Tescos in a foreign country, you are able to once again see the world around you more clearly. Your senses come back. For a time you again feel alive. You are able once again to see the beauty and the ugliness in the world around you in full vivid color. Of course it wears off in time. The cataracts return. If you are one to notice such things, you soon realize it’s time to turn the picture upside down again. Often you find yourself reaching for a map.

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