Explore

It's always great to get a chance to explore a city you haven't really had the opportunity to. Cities are beautifully messy packages of civilisation; jewels of engineering, culture, imagination and history.

I've written a lot about my connection to my own city, Melbourne, whom I love like a family member, but right now I'm hacking away at my laptop in Sydney. It's a place I've visited quite a few times but never really sunk my teeth into. I've always viewed it somewhat adversarially in many ways: particularly as a sports fan, but also in terms of the different cultures and philosophies of the two cities. It's always seemed the flashier, more superficial of the two cultures to me, which grated against my identity as a lover of the gritty, organic feel that I see and relate to in Melbourne.

I've been here with my buddy Dave the last few days and apart from attending a soccer match and the prerequisite drinking that is involved in that activity, we've really had very little planned, so we've spent a lot of time simply free-form exploring: just looking at things and thinking, "yeah, let's check that out", or "hey, I wonder what's down there, that looks cool."

This type of travelling really has a lot to recommend it, I think. It's not stressful like over-planned holidays tend to be, and it's really rewarding. We've ducked through alleyways, walked around bays, marvelled at gorgeous buildings, avoided fights, imbibed three dollar bourbons, watched an indie band cover a Rage Against The Machine song, played Metallica pinball, caught up with old friends and eaten more burgers and pizzas than any reasonable person should have.

In short, we've been exploring. This seems to me to be something like the right way to travel, if there could ever be such a thing. One of the drawbacks of the schedules and the structures of our lives is that they grant us very little room for exploring our own home cities because there is always something more pressing for us to do when we're at home. On this journey we've had a couple of concrete things planned, a couple of vague things in mind and a whole bunch of days where we have had nothing going on. These unplanned things that I mentioned above have been incredibly rewarding.

This might be a stretch, so you'll have to bare with me, but maybe there's an interesting parallel between travelling and doing creative work. The battle we face in both pursuits is seeing the things that we need to see whilst simultaneously putting our own individual stamp onto the proceedings. I wonder what the point is of spending a week visiting the top seven destinations in a new place and leaving with the same completed checklist hanging out of your pockets as the thousands of other people waiting in the departure lounge each day. Conversely, my experience is that the sort of events and adventures that make a trip meaningful are quite often the most serendipitous, the most intangible or the most surprising. This might be terrific as a theory but utterly frustrating as a tool for making travel better. How do we plan for what is completely and utterly unplannable? Similarly, how do we create things that make people smile, that make them think, that change the way they feel, when we know that the things that do that to us are so mysterious and unpredictable?

The answer might be exploration. That idea that we just need to make things up as we go along. To plan as little as possible as often as possible. To make sure that as often as we can, we put our own stamp on what is happening in our lives. Understanding that great things are not the things that other people expect to be great but the things that make us feel something, anything at all. Loose threads need to be pulled. Expectations need to be abandoned, completely and utterly. Go exploring, as soon as you can.

The no excuse lifestyle

Sometimes we can do things, sometimes we can't, but at the moment I'm trying to embrace what I'm calling the 'no excuses' lifestyle. I'm still fleshing it out but I think there might be something to this.

Every one of us has the same amount of time in any given week: one hundred and sixty eight hours. The recommended amount of sleep for an adult works out to be about fifty three hours, which leaves one hundred and fifteen waking hours. The full time working week is thirty eight hours. If you allow two hours a week for travelling to work, which I consider to be a conservative estimate, you are left with seventy five free waking hours. That's not long at all considering what most people have to achieve in that time. We have to be particularly careful: not just in how we use this time but careful about how honest we are with ourselves and others about why we are allocating it in the way that we are.

There is no purer expression of our priorities than the way we spend our time. This is one of the cold, hard, brutal truths of life. Talk is cheap. In economic parlance, our time is a highly constrained resource; our words, thoughts and good intentions are not. Truly knowing and understanding this means reorganising your life to better reflect what you really value. Only you can tell whether you are doing this well or not. They are your priorities and they are what makes your life your own.

Doing this effectively most often means cutting things out, not adding things in. Taking things that we like out of our lives can be painful, but we need to understand that the greater space that is granted to our true priorities, the better the experiences are in relation to these things. This requires the sort of honesty that we don't really like to dish out to ourselves, but it's really important.

My idea for the 'no excuses' lifestyle is pretty simple. If something is a genuine priority for you at a given time, you will find the time to do it. If you don't, it simply was not as high a priority for you as the things you actually did. Don't be dishonest to yourself or others: that thing didn't happen because it wasn't as important to you as what you ended up doing. If you are honest with yourself, you won't need to make excuses for anything. 'I was busy' is an excuse; 'I had other things to do that were more important' is honest. So many things we do in our lives are not actually that pressing and can be feasibly moved around. This is not excuse-making, it is prioritisation and it is life.

The angel and the devil

'Moving at a steady pace, it seems the angel and the devil on my shoulders can't ever seem to settle a debate...'

Horrorshow - No Rides Left

In the cartoons, we often see an angel and a devil perched on the opposing shoulders of a protagonist. It's easy to visualise and a pretty simple model of understanding behaviour. It suggests we face a constant struggle between selfish and selfless versions of ourselves. Your angel wants you to do the right thing; your devilish advisor wants you to do the easy thing, the beneficial thing, the most advantageous thing. We all understand this. Who hasn't found twenty dollars on the ground in a shopping centre and considered pocketing it rather than handing it in somewhere?

It's important for us to understand this dichotomy, these opposing motivations that drive our decision-making and our behaviour. I think that it's likely that most people have something like this going on in their own minds but with their own variations. I want to share what I've figured out about mine.

The majority of the time I listen intently to and obey the guy in the white outfit: the angel, if you will. That figure wants me to be honest, kind, fair and humble. I want to be those things, too, as much as I can separate myself from that character. In fact, I generally associate this voice with myself. That's me representing myself in my mind.

The other figure doesn't provide much advice per se. He mostly just follows along with the action and heckles from the sidelines. He is extremely cynical about the instructions and advice issued by his adversary. In fact, his job seems to be to simply undermine the work of my better angel.

When one of your key objectives is to be a fundamentally good person, you're always trying to be considerate and empathetic. Often this involves letting things go and putting other people's feelings before your own. These are good traits. But this is where my devil comes in.

He considers these things weak, indecisive behaviour and feels that this quest to be a good person is just a thinly veiled disguise for approval-seeking. He thinks that feeling like you are putting others before yourself is just an excuse to shy away from difficult or awkward situations. He knows it's easier to justify this behaviour to yourself if you project your uncomfortable feelings onto someone else and rationalise that by avoiding a difficult situation you are helping them rather than yourself. If that's true, you aren't really being considerate at all; you are being a coward. The whole edifice of goodness collapses. It was never really about the others then, it just was a different kind of self-involvement.

It's important for me to have identified what he's doing: he's the voice of self-doubt. He questions my motivations, my strength and my philosophies. He can be really loud. Sometimes his arguments seem persuasive. When I'm at my most vulnerable, it seems like he's the only one speaking sense.

Knowing what kind of work your own devil is doing is important. We need to listen really closely to the talk that is taking place in our heads, to at least try to understand what motivates our behaviour and decisions. The better at this we become, the better we can understand the things that we might be putting in the way of our own growth and progress. I think the angel and the devil from the cartoons are real, you just need to get to know them a little bit.