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 people who attend 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, which is split between scientific community of geographers, official explorers, and normal people who are driven to take independent travel journeys, which push their own boundaries and provide inspiration to other people. 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 to survive and it provides inspiration. If you go somewhere extreme and collect data and knowledge then you progress human understanding. If you are a normal person and you decide to communicate experience and personal transformation through a book, photography, 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 sat on 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 key word 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 learned 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 the 14-16th November.