Brock { Abroad }

There is a website I really like called Marc and Angel Hack Life: Practical Tips for Productive Living. In an article entitled How to Achieve Your Goals, one tip they recommend is having a support group of like-minded people who share similar goals as you that you meet with once a week to help each other self-reflect, gauge progress, and create an overall positive energy. This is what I see Knowmads as. Although I’m not incredibly clear on a definitive list of shared goals, it’s great to be in a group that shares similar values, principles, and a drive to live the life we love by “combining passion, business, and playful learning.”

As I’ve been preparing for a workshop in conjunction with the Hub Amsterdam for their Summer Learning Festival, I’ve spent my past few weeks developing some tools that may be utilized in our workshop. Together with my mastermind partners in crime Naomi, Oscar, Fran, and Manu, we’ve used each other to create more self-awareness in each other. Whether we were making lists of what we want to have, be, or do, interviewing each other, creating questions without worrying so much about the answers, or writing a love letter to ourselves, I have cherished this recent Sunday ritual. So, I’d like to dedicate this post to these people, who pick me up after long weeks. I love you all.

As we enter a break from Knowmads and I tackle the Social Innovation Safari, travel to Sweden for a Vipassana Medition Retreat, and visit a special someone in Oslo, I sit writing this on a Sunday. It’s my first Sunday in a month without my “mastermind group.” As I was thinking about them and surfing one of my favorite life-hacking sites, I found a new Sunday ritual to keep me going: 20 Questions You Should Ask Yourself Every Sunday.

Finally, if you are in the Amsterdam area between the 25-28 of August and would like to more about our Knowmadic Learning Lab, check out the previous link, and stay tuned for a new blog dedicated to living, learning, and loving. As for now, check out my fellow Knowmadic friend Naomi’s blog called just that. I love the learnings she shares.

Keep Calm and Carry On, everybody.

Recently at Knowmads, in a day-long workshop on Sustainability, we learned about The Natural Step. Founded in 1989 by Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt in Sweden, The Natural Step has been introduced to thousands of organizations as a means of creating a more globally-conscious society. Based on theory and research of the science behind the true meaning of sustainability, it aims to apply this theory into practice using the following framework:

This framework is based on the following four system conditions that positively develop people, planet, and profit:

In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing:

1. concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust;
2. concentrations of substances produced by society;
3. degradation by physical means and, in that society,
4. people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.

With that, I close with a question that I’ve been asking myself lately:

What is the natural step for you in your journey and how can you live life more fully while making a more positive impact not just on yourself, but also for the world?

find what is sacred.

believe in belief.

be inquisitive.

You’re beginning to ask bigger questions of yourself and the world you are encountering along the way. Suddenly, you ask of yourself: What do I really want to get out of this journey?

Up until then, you feel that you were merely stumbling around without actually paying attention to making sure that each foot went after the other. Your feet still stumble, but at least you attempt to be more aware of it. You have faith that those feet will keep taking you forward…

I like to call it {abroad} way of thinking…

I left on my own pilgrimage in search of my passion. I wanted to grow as a writer, but also as a person. I wanted to find my story in the telling.

What you say and do, how you communicate, are merely your forms of expressing yourself. Information gets lost, ‘in translation’. It begins taking on new dimensions from the completely unique perceptions each individual applies to some very universal concepts. In other words, everyone has their own definition of the truth and each individual must define it for themselves. It makes the world go round. It’s how things are created, innovated, imagined, and explored. It’s the art of dreaming and the science of doing. It’s understanding that everyone is in search of their own truth, and no two truths will be the same.

Disappearing from the world and into myself, I was able to begin to express where my heart was. I needed long-term solitude free of everyday distractions that were keeping me from knowing where my path should lead me. I realized I couldn’t possibly “know”, but I could always be experiencing.

After walking over 400 kilometers, I felt an amazing sense of accomplishment. However, The feeling was soon followed by an immediate sense of emptiness. A feeling that the journey was somehow over.

After a little over a week interacting with people as little as possible, I was beginning to feel a lot more comfortable in solitude. I was also beginning to see it in my writing, or rather, my confidence to do so. My confidence to create. Not just create writing, but create whatever and whoever I wanted to be, to live life in a new and exciting way. I was finally aware that there were infinite possibilities and if I was open to creating them, I could really begin to change who I was into who I want to be.

I began feeling happier. I felt a sense of newfound clarity breathing in fresh mountain air and carrying everything I owned on my back. Each step brought me closer to my destination, and one foot couldn’t go before the other. It was a practice in meditation on all levels. It was simple. Time didn’t seem to matter and was broken up by eating, writing, thinking, and not thinking. From one village to the next. From morning to night.

“never trust a thought that didn’t come by walking”

-nietzsche

I had a big question looming on my mind as I embarked on the journey. Where is the path taking me next? I was unsure if moving to a city full of vices was really what I was looking for. Wasn’t I supposed to travel the world? Wasn’t I supposed to spend a spontaneously simple life out of a backpack meeting new faces without any schedule or plan? It almost seemed as if I was just throwing the towel in and letting whatever happened… well, happen. Which, don’t get me wrong, isn’t a bad thing. As a matter of fact, It’s how I found myself here in Amsterdam, actually.

There is a big difference between leading your life and letting your life lead you, and I was beginning to see that I was going wrong because of one major problem. I was letting things just “happen” to me instead of actually making things “happen.” The problem was that I didn’t know how to make my life really be what I pictured it to be. I was staring at a blank canvas and hoping the Mona Lisa would just appear. In a perfect world, maybe. But we don’t live in a perfect world and I hope that’s why you’re reading this right now. Because you actually believe you can do something about it.

It’s by taking one step after the other, one stroke of the paintbrush at a time and being open to changing course when you think you were meant to do something else. It’s being open to yourself that will give you the answers and there is simply no possible way you can know what you’re supposed to do except for this very moment that, in this case, you have dedicated to yourself to in this moment, reading this very blog. It’s a choice that you’ve made. Fortunately, I can not tell you how to make any choice in your life.

It’s fortunate that we have that freedom to make those decisions for ourselves, because nobody knows you better than you do. No matter how much people love you, you understand that no one but yourself can possibly know what is best for you and it is important to take that time in solitude to evaluate yourself as an individual free from any job, person, thing, obstacle, or limit.

It’s about taking the time to take care of your garden instead of thinking someone else will take care of it for you, or furthermore, that it will take care of itself.

So, my website has undergone a bit of a make-over. I have a new banner photo, a new photo format, and have cleaned up the long post into more condensed previews. Finally, I changed my About page (colors may be off, sorry, so read below) to something I recently wrote as my statement of purpose for the National Geographic Youth Correspondents Program I think it fits me a bit better, and over time, will be the backbone to creating a business from this website…
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Reykjavik was a long, rainy, fairly cold, and very expensive 24 hour visit. (even though it’s a recession there, I still have the dollar…) I instantly made a friend from my friendly neighboring province of Ontario who I spent the day with wandering around the provincial city that 60% of Iceland’s 300,000 people inhabit.  After warming up in one of the many geothermal pools located in Iceland and getting a shower, we made plans to go to the Reykjavik International Film Festival opening night, still currently taking place. It was difficult to make a connection with the contact I’d made from couch surfing, but by six p.m. I was contacted by his roommate to inform me that Asgeir had fallen in love and was currently touring the ring of Iceland with his new girl. Nonetheless, the invitation still stood and I arrived to their home after the film, Another Planet, based on the hardships of youth in developing countries; instantly I was offered a beer by a fellow couch surfer, a girl from Rome, who had been staying with the four boys for a week. What ensued was a broad conversation around world politics, hypocrisy, mushroom cultivation in Iceland, psychology, and more topics so off-topic that they ended up relevant. I didn’t go to bed until one or two in the morning and had to leave by four to catch an early flight. But, thank you Oskar for the bed and for killing your television to silence the mass media hysteria; it’s what makes my mother think the Middle East is somehow more dangerous than anywhere else in the world.

There’s something very thrilling about arriving in a city; whether it’s a city you know and love, would love to know, or somewhere in between. I knew I loved Amsterdam after a brief visit here back in 2006, but was excited about coming back. My first plan of action was to call Bobby, my Bulgarian host.  I took a moment to listen to a street musician, or “busker”, and even stopped to smell the tulips! I was unsuccessful. There was a coffee shop next door that wafted out the delicious aroma of a plant that may not have been as pretty as those tulips, but definitely had its own charms. I looked down to my watch. I was in complete disbelief! Three hours had passed since I began staring down all the slim buildings that graced the canals lined with bicycles, bikes, bars, babes, and boys alike.
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