Off the Beaten Track

I was lucky enough to hear Simon Murray and Pen Hadow being interviewed by Jonathan Dimblebey at the RGS this evening. I know Pen pretty well – we spent two months together skiing towards the North Pole in 2001 but I'd never heard Simon speak until this evening. And what a speaker he was – he stole the show with scores of rip-roaring anecdotes and left us all with the impression that he'd squeezed a dozen lifetimes into his sixty-odd years.

Far and away the best bit was his answer to a question about 'paths' in life. He quoted Jean Jacques Rousseau ('man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains'), saying:

'Wrong. Man is born in prison. If a child is born to a wealthy lawyer in Boston, his life will go in this direction. If a child is born in a slum in Caracas, his life will go in that direction… That's not freedom. Freedom lies in breaking away from these paths that are set out in front of us. Only then do we have the space to really find ourselves. That's why I do these things: not merely to test myself, but to FIND myself.'

I've paraphrased wildy here but wowee, what a dude.

— Filed under Rumination