The gift of travel

Feeling stuck? In a rut? Sick of yourself? Discombobulated? Going through the motions? This is a Public Service Announcement: setting yourself free is not as hard as you think. Try our free and easy rut ejection regime and you’ll be rutless in no time.

Remember: wherever you are, you are traveling the world. Look around you. Walk a different way from usual. Imagine you’re seeing it all for the first time. 

Notice the people who take care to dress just so. A brooch on the collar of a blazer. A suggestion of light-heartedness in the sock area. There’s a woman near my house who always, without fail, wears absolutely, one hundred percent, green. Head to toe. These people take the time to present themselves to the world as an aesthetic performance of themselves, an expression of who they are.

People’s gardens are often an expression of the same thing. And their homes. A little “welcome to me” flourish, without saying a word. That we work so hard for each other, and to become ourselves, that’s something worth remembering, sometimes, when you’re in need of rut ejection: you could change all of that. Present yourself to the world entirely differently. All you need is a blazer and brooch. 

Here’s a thing that children do all the time and almost no adults do: learn a new thing entirely from scratch merely to satisfy a curiosity. It’s all children do, when left to their own devices. They spend all morning trying to build a tower that doesn’t fall over or persisting with the monkey bars or figuring out the best way to redirect a trail of ants. So if it’s a rut you’re stuck in: be curious. Teach yourself how to knit, or ride a skateboard, or bake, or play an instrument. The best bit is the bit where your brain hurts from doing the new thing for so long that you have to stop and have a cup of tea.

Simple rut-removal tip: get a haircut. Little ones are good, but big ones are better. Go the full change. Cut it off. Dye it another colour. Go asymmetrical. Feeling different in the follicles is enough to lift you into a whole new realm. 

Go to a festival. A music festival. A writers’ festival. A film festival. Festivals are a way of marinating in an art form, experiencing it with an engaged audience of curious people. 

Don’t have the budget? Read a book. Better still, ask someone you admire to recommend a book to you. Could be anything. Fiction. Self help. Poetry. A play. Books recommended by other people contain two texts; the one written by the author and the one written from the recommender to you. 

Also: you know what people are in a rut are never doing? Cartwheels. When was the last time you tried a cartwheel? Or rolling down a hill? Or skipping? Reorient yourself in the universe. Release some endorphins. Be a kid again.

Lastly, if life’s a bit tough, go to your local library and sit near the front desk where people go to ask questions. Listen to five questions. What do you know now that you didn’t know before? If the answer is nothing, then you haven’t been listening. At risk of demolishing the fourth wall, I will confess that I write these very words right now in a library, and I have so far learned the following: some people are such big fans of authors that they borrow new editions of books they have already read just in case the introduction has been updated. When a book is hard to find in a library, you are most likely to find it in a section ambiguously called People And Places. I know this because I have borne witness to an increasingly hilarious series of joke between the librarians on the subject. “Here’s a book about the production of handmade glassware in the Weimar Republic”, “Oh thank you so much. Pop it in People And Places will you Susan“ etc. I have learned that one woman couldn’t return her library book because her cat was so sick she couldn’t leave the house but that she won’t be fined because “we don’t fine people with sick cats”. And I learned that librarians do a lot more than put books back on shelves. 

This is a Public Service Announcement: leave the rut at home and go for a walk. You never know what you might find.

This originally appeared in The Big Issue.