Stories and plans

I watched a short film this week. It has been replaying in my head ever since.

It is not sophisticated. A young man answers his phone. It is his grandfather, who has decided, apparently out of nowhere, to say the one thing he actually needs to say:

I do not regret a single experience in my life. I regret the ideas I never made real, and the opportunities I turned my back on. Don't make my mistakes. Wake up, child, and make your life unforgettable.

The rest is the young man doing exactly that. Mountains, horses, cold water. It ends with him saying, quietly, grandpa, you're going to be proud of me.

I finally understand why it will not leave me alone.

A trip you take becomes a story. A trip you postpone stays a plan.

That is the whole difference, and it is enormous. Time is generous to everything you actually do — the missed ferry, the leaking tent, the trip where everybody argued. All of it turns into stories, and the worst trips into the best ones. Nobody has ever told me, about any journey they actually took, I regret going.

Time gives a postponed trip nothing. It stays exactly as you wrote it — a plan — and plans age terribly. They never become stories. They become the sentence the grandfather said on the phone. He had been carrying his for fifty years.

Every postponed trip is filed under the same word. Someday. When things settle down.

Things do not settle down. You settle down — slowly, without noticing — and someday is where it happens. It is the politest way of telling yourself no.

The travellers I admire are not braver than anyone else. They have simply stopped negotiating with that word. Tuesday works. October works. The forecast is bad; the forecast is always bad somewhere. They go, and the stories pile up, and the plans stop.

Yes, I build a vehicle. It is called Ānanya, and I am not going to pretend I wrote this letter by accident.

But Ānanya is not really a vehicle. It is an argument against someday — built so that leaving is so easy the excuse has nothing left to hold onto.

And here is what my industry won't say out loud: Ānanya, a tent, a cheap flight and a questionable hostel — the hardware barely matters. It never did. What matters is whether you are feeding the stories or the plans.

One day the phone call is yours to make. You will either be the old man with the speech, or the one with the stories.

There is still time to be the one with the stories.