BRIAN BRAWDY PRESENTS WONDER.EXPLORE.BELIEVE.

TODAY’S EXPLORER

When some of us think of explorers or exploration, we are taken back to a distant time when super-human gymnastics in wild, untamed lands shaped our definition. Truth is, exploration is a term forged by people driven to expand their vision of their current world. Period.

It’s personal.

It’s about self-exploration as well as surveying a personally foreign land.

Let’s look at a few terms.

Explore: to familiarize oneself with the unfamiliar, to search out and investigate what you are unacquainted with. Pretty straight forward I think.

Nothing about being the first, about representing the rest of humanity, about sticking your flagpole on some virgin piece of earth, about death-defying feats of heroism, superhuman strength or divine guidance from above. None of it.

Where does the confusion come from? I blame Star Trek: “… to boldly go where no man has gone before,” blah, blah, blah.

Now, that’s certainly not meant to take away from the Shackelton/Lewis and Clark types of our past. Pretty remarkable exploits punctuate human history. Still, what made them “explorers” was discovering new lands with their own eyes, through their own toil, blazing their own trails. The explorers of our past used bipedalism, snowshoes, dugout canoes or kayaks, horses, dogsleds, covered wagons, airplanes, helicopters, even lunar landers and rovers.

Do you ever get tired of hearing that there is “nowhere left to explore” or that “humans have mapped every corner of the earth”? Oh well, I guess I should pack it in, someone else has “been there, done that.”

Here is my point. If it’s new to you — if you’re witnessing a foreign and unfamiliar land firsthand and for the first time — doesn’t that make you an explorer? If it’s new terrain and you’re personally crossing that “little bit of foreign” as I call it, don’t you qualify for the title explorer?

One more definition, if you don’t mind.

Exotic: It comes from the Greek “exutikos” meaning foreign, outside the ordinary. It means unconventional or unusual. So once again, if it is new to you, it’s exotic. Yes? If it’s foreign to the convention of your status quo, if it’s outside the usual happenstance of your everyday, does that not fit the definition of exotic?

OK. So now I am going to rewrite the definition of Explorer. An explorer is someone who finds the exotic where they find themselves. No plagiarizing the exploits of those who have gone before you. No looking at the pretty pictures of faraway places daydreaming about “someday.” No crying about being second.

In the end, explorers bring the faraway (both mentally and physically) to their own front door.

ABOUT BRIAN Conservation through Exploration Philosophy