POSTS
Explore Expedition Planning Weekend at the RGS 2014
The Explore seminar at the Royal Geographical Society is coming up in November. I contribute through conversations with attendees, conveying my experience of journeys. It is a time of reflection after journeys and a time to prepare.
I used to think adventure was deciding to go into a wild place and doing a hard walk or bike ride. However, it is much deeper and personal. All true journeys are very personal.
The Royal Geographical Society is an organisation that is split between the scientific community of geographers, official explorers, and ordinary people who are driven to take independent travel journeys that push their own boundaries and provide inspiration to others. A community of companies who provide equipment and logistics supports this.
Why is it such an inspiring organisation and event? If you take one person or a group who is willing to do something extreme and survive, it provides inspiration. If you go somewhere extreme and collect data and knowledge, then you progress human understanding. If you are an ordinary person and you decide to communicate experience and personal transformation through a book, photography, or a website, then you inspire others.
Why is it that we need to be inspired? What happens during times which were less than peaceful? Did people really need the same level of inspiration when their everyday life was already wild?
These days we can be doing any number of jobs but still be sitting at a computer screen. It’s possible to be an architect, designer, engineer, teacher, accountants, business analyst, writer, and many other job roles while still sitting at a computer screen.
The keyword of the day is ‘data’. Scientific expeditions go to collect data that is brought back and that data is used to present a problem; however, the data does not help to present solutions.
Expeditions inherently require more than computer screens to accomplish, which is one huge attraction of preparing and doing an expedition. In addition, what is actually experienced and learnt from an expedition is considerably more than a spreadsheet with some dry ‘data’ in it, hence why when people communicate their journeys in a myriad of forms it is so attractive and exciting.
The Explore weekend at the RGS will be between 14-16 November.