It's a Friday evening in February 1999. I'm at a game reserve a few hours drive outside of Johannesburg, sitting around a campfire with a colleague from the office. It's the first night of our weekend hiking the trails inside the reserve. I first met Simon in Copenhagen on a project kick off meeting at the end of 1998, we spoke briefly at that time, we had exchanged some e-mails over the weeks leading up to my trip, and I've only been in South Africa since early Thursday morning. I cannot remember how it happened, all I can recall is that I felt completely comfortable talking with Simon, so very at ease. As time passed, our conversation around the fire that evening moved on to matters of a personal nature, and we began to discuss various aspects of our lives. Perhaps it was because of where we were. Perhaps being in Africa for the first time had cast a spell on me. Perhaps it was because of the stars overhead and the fire burning brightly. All I know is that at that moment, I felt an incredible peace and calmness within myself. I did not yet know it or recognise what was happening, but my heart was beginning to stir, beginning to awaken to possibility. At some point in the conversation, Simon turned and asked me. "What is it that you really want to do with your life Andy?" I sat silent for a few moments and pondered his question, before I replied, "I really don't know." Simon looked at me and then he just simply stated, "Yes you do."
I can remember sitting there, feeling frustrated at having someone I hardly knew, tell me that I did know what it was that I wanted to do, when I was unable to formulate or picture it for myself in my own mind, let alone give a voice to it. How could someone else know the answer if I did not? At the time, this made no sense to me. I asked Simon that very question and he replied, "Deep inside of each of us, our true calling is locked away. It is locked away by no one other than ourselves, and we each possess the power to unlock it, to acknowledge it and to set it free, if we choose to do so. Some of us manage to do that in life and some of are unable to do it", he explained. "You always know what it is that you want to do", he repeated.
That weekend in the reserve, a work colleague became a true, dear friend. In fact, Simon was to be so much more than that. He became the person that sparked the change within me. He became not only a great friend, he also became a mentor and spiritual guide. I found in Simon, someone I could talk openly with about all aspects of life. I did not need to be guarded or hesitant in what I said to him. He understood me and he understood where I was in life, because he had also been there.
I used the anecdote of sitting around the campfire with Simon to illustrate an important point. Many of us do not understand or cannot acknowledge what our true paths in life are. I was no different. Even if I did know, I was not yet ready to do anything about it. I needed more time. In fact, it turned out that I needed another seven years to reach the point where I was ready to do something different, but even then, I still could not have said what my true path was. It is very easy to look at people who say that they have discovered that thing in life which gives them joy and pleasure, who tell you that they are living their dream, and to think that it was easy for them. It is easy to think that other people already knew what it was that they wanted to do and all they had to do was to simply begin. But the truth is that this is not the case.
There will always be certain people in life who have a clear idea of exactly what it is that they want to do. But for many of us, we simply do not know and in making our decisions on leaving school, or what courses to take at college or university, we stumble into something and we say to ourselves, well this isn't too bad. It was certainly like that for me in my early life. I left school with no direction and no clue. I eventually fell into an accountancy role and I managed to develop a career from that point onwards. Was it really what I had envisioned for my life? Was it my dream? No. But it was something. And once we start down that path and we advance our careers, then it becomes increasingly more difficult to make a switch to something else. We start to become entrenched in a life that we are not sure that we ever really wanted for ourselves. And because we become entrenched, making a jump to a different kind of life becomes increasingly more and more difficult. Discovering your true path becomes even harder. That does not mean that it becomes impossible. It is never impossible.
It would take me a further seven years and five months from having that conversation in South Africa, to reach a point in my life, when an opportunity presented itself to try something different. In the time between the campfire talk and the opportunity arising, I had been slowly changing. From that trip to South Africa onwards, I began my spiritual evolution. Very slowly at first, but that did not matter. All that mattered was that it had begun. I knew there was something that I wanted to do, I could feel it in my heart. I used to speak to another colleague and friend of mine about it. We would sit and chat over lunch on a weekend and often find ourselves watching the Travel Channel. Jane would tell me of her times backpacking through Thailand and Australia and I knew it was something that I also wanted to do. My sister had also done a similar thing on a gap year between school and university and I remembered how envious I was of her at the time. Traveling. Backpacking. The allure was such an incredible pull.
Eventually, an opportunity arose to go backpacking to Asia and as soon as it became more than just idle chit-chat over beers in the pub, I said yes. I quit my job, sold everything, and two months later I was in Bangkok, Thailand. I was scared, I was lost, I was out of my depth and I was out of my comfort zone. Everything that I had been used to in my life was gone. All of the securities I had enjoyed no longer existed. But I was doing something I had always wanted to do and because of that, I began to change and I became even more open to the possibilities of life.
At the moment that I said yes and quit my job, I had begun my journey. I had taken my first tentative steps along my true path. From that moment on, I gave life the go ahead to present me with opportunities that could never have existed in my old life. A couple of weeks after I arrived in Bangkok, I was on the island of Phuket and I tried scuba diving for the first time in my life. I loved it. I had found something that made sense to me. I reluctantly came back up to the surface after that first dive and I was unable to take the grin off of my face. The corners of my mouth were stuck in a seemingly permanent up position. That day, my life changed again and my path changed direction. I had found something that I wanted to do. I had discovered something that unlocked the passion within me. I had found my calling. My heart was happy and free.
Since that day in Phuket, my life has changed and changed again. I have come to realise that what Simon told me that evening in South Africa was in fact completely true. I had known all along what it was that I wanted to do. The problem was that I too afraid to unlock it and to admit it. I had always dreamed of adventure and travel and as a young boy, growing up next to the beach on the south coast of England, I had imagined spending my life on a tropical beach somewhere. That was my dream. It was very simple. It may not have been overly ambitious, but that did not matter. The only thing that mattered was that it was my dream.
You cannot and you will not discover your own path unless you put away you fears and try. Even if you do not know exactly what it is you want to do, unless you try to do something different, you give yourself no chance of ever finding out. The only way to discover your true path is to take a deep breath, steady yourself and then take that first step. I can promise you this, it gets easier. The path will lead you to wonders and miracles that you could never have imagined. Take that first step and you are walking your true path. Take that first step and you are one step closer to realising your dream. Once you take that first step, you will never be alone on the path because your heart will awaken, it will sing songs of joy, and it will keep you company.
They say fortune favours the brave. I say, fortune favours those of us who place one foot in front of the other, and who take that first step on the paths that lead to our dreams, that will lead us to glory, and lead us to treasures unimaginable.
Go on. Go discover. Go walk your one true path. You have to try. You owe it to yourself. Unlock your heart. Unlock the love. Dreams do become reality.
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