There must be something about us humans that makes us naturally curious. We’ve scaled mountains we couldn’t breathe on, created technologies to explore unimaginable depths, touched down on land that exists outside of our planet and photographed galaxies ‘far, far away’. But it’s not just the grandiose that we’ve set out to discover. We have encountered components of our own bodies that make individual hairs look like the Burj Khalifa and then quantum physics has shown that impossibly-tinier things make up a part of our reality.
I’ve begun to realise just how much I love to explore (hence the wonderfully witty title, please don't actually call me Dora). One element of that is within physical space. Building my fitness, along with my understanding of an area, has enabled me to be confident in getting lost whilst on a run, which means I get to follow my nose and find new paths and entire places that I never knew about, even in locations I’ve known for years.
Along a similar vein, I love trying new things when I go to a restaurant or cook myself a meal. I’ve got no idea if I’ll enjoy the food, but that doesn’t matter to me because the joy is in the trying, not in the knowing. Of course, there are times that it does go wrong (which are pretty few and far between), but those just serve to help you gain a greater appreciation for when it goes right.
It won’t have escaped you that exploring goes beyond simply having new experiences and going to new places. There really is something to be said for trusting that you will be able to cope with whatever is down the line without knowing what those things are. And the more you do, the more you are able to build your confidence, develop your current skills and unlock new ones, so that all of a sudden, a dull world is filled with a little more colour.
For me, exploring my mental health and relevant experiences from my past has helped to shine a light on certain behaviours, beliefs and thought patterns I’d rather change. Take for example, the ridiculous number of hours I spend on YouTube. I won’t go into detail here because it’s not really the point of this blog, but in short, by learning more about myself and my addictive behaviours, I’ve started to go from:
Judging myself
Feeling shame
Feeling hopeless
to
Positive reinforcement
Recognising my YouTube use as an unhealthy coping mechanism and addressing what I’m struggling to cope with
Being a bit more compassionate with myself
Remembering that stalling ≠ stopping - and therefore choosing to stop watching, even if I’ve already wasted a lot of the day by watching
Some of the places exploring has taken me over the last 6 months
It’s definitely not easy work, especially given how easy it is to return to old coping mechanisms as I navigate the stress of moving to a new country (including trying to find long-term accommodation in a popular city). But as I’ve written before, I want this to be a new chapter in my life and for that to be true, intention is not enough, action is also required.
As part of all this, I’m going to be pausing this website. You may well be thinking, “does it count as a pause when you haven’t posted in months?” That’s a fair question and the answer to that is I’d already started the pause, I just hadn’t told anyone about it. I’m only mentioning it now because I’m going to save some money by pausing my paid account with Wix, which means that the web address will change for a while.
Another question you might have is “but why, Fabian? I adore your writing, I adore you, how can I live without your updates and insights?” Well first of all, thank you kindly. Second, the motivation behind this is that I’m trying to learn new things, things like internal validation and doing things for their inherent value, not for the approval I think they might get me. So I will keep writing because it’s arguably my most natural form of expression, but what I write won’t be shared, at least for a while.
Assuming that this break doesn’t turn into a breakup, my continued writing does have the advantage of meaning I will probably have a bunch of blogs ready to post when I’m back. So make sure to subscribe at the bottom of this page so you don't miss out!
In the meantime, get out there and live your lives. I hope that you appreciate the world you exist within now and that you have a great time exploring whatever worlds you choose to enter.
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