No, but...

The Doorstep Mile

Yes, but

Living more adventurously might appeal to you if:

• You have a yearning to live a more extraordinary life, but don’t know how to get started.
• You enjoy stories of adventure but don’t believe they’re realistic for someone like you.
• Everything is fine, but you’d like to rekindle a few dreams and that childlike audacity you lost somewhere along the way.
• You wake up on Monday mornings with a sigh.
• You spend more time looking at your phone than making memories.
• Your most interesting anecdote from the past year involves office life, your kids’ potty training, the Christmas party, or something you saw on TV.
• The prospect of looking back on your life with regrets fills you with sadness and urgency.

Now, I know what you are thinking. In fact, I can already hear you shouting loudly and angrily at me right now. ‘It’s all very well for you to say! It is easy for you. But my life is different because…’

• I don’t have enough time! (54% of people said this in a Living Adventurously newsletter poll. www.alastairhumphreys.com/living-adventurously)
• I feel guilty/selfish/it’s not fair on my family! (49%)
• I don’t have enough money! (38%)
• I’ve got nobody to do adventurous stuff with! (37%)
• I worry about making the wrong choice! (29%)
• I don’t know how to begin! (24%)
• I feel like an imposter! I’ll fail! (23%)
• I’m scared! (22%)

I know you are shouting this because it is what everyone shouts – including me when I read other people’s stuff. So I will cut you off, politely but firmly, at this point. An essential task of this book is to make you aware of this voice in your head. The loud voice that is always ready, at the slightest opportunity, to leap up and shout, ‘I can’t do this because…’ After all, if we cry for too long about our limitations, then we get to keep them.

I know there are hurdles. Of course I do. Time, money, family, illness, bills, Jaws the hamster: there are a million and one things holding us back from galloping off into the sunset and changing the course of our lives. We are all in the same boat. I recently learned a word that sums this up. Sonder is ‘the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness.’

I want to try to make you accept that the voice in your head is not really shouting at the random author of a book you’re reading. It is you shouting at you. Yelling an endless, hard-to-ignore stream of objections, excuses, self-pity, blame and To-Do lists. The same thing is happening in my head: Who the hell am I to write a self-help book? I can’t sort my own life out.

I am not pretending to provide solutions with a handy 7-Step-Plan-To-Adventure-Greatness. Only you can do that. What I will try to do is help you notice the noise, feel the fear and then do stuff anyway.

OVER TO YOU:
List all the ‘no buts’ you were shouting at me.

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