Take Note.

10 Life Lessons I Learned From Hitchhiking.

Welcome back.

How have you been? Pull up a stool, I’ve got fresh coffee coming and a few ambling thoughts for you.

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ is not only a very cliched question that many creatives get asked, but it’s also a question I genuinely ask of myself. The truth is, it seldom feels like a single fully formed idea, more like a collection of sticks, twigs and branches, floating down a slow moving river until one of them gets caught, snags another, pulls in a third and so on. Before you know it, the accumulation of detritus is an entity itself, collecting more and more the bigger it gets, and finally having the strength to dictate the flow of the water that created it.

I guess there’s already and analogy for this, and it’s the snowball rolling down the hill getting bigger, but that feels like far too rapid a metaphor for the process I experience. And it’s colder.

Also, everyone has their medium, but I don’t work in ‘twigs’, so these disparate elements take the form of notes and sketches, spread across many notebooks and pieces of paper. Each one is a potential jigsaw piece, waiting for a jigsaw to be formed around it. Or perhaps it’s nothing. Or shit. Some are hibernating, and some are forever homeless. Or just, ‘it is what it is’.

If I’m stuck, I will often flick through these notes, trying to remember what I meant by them and hoping to find a forgotten link to new chain I’ve started somewhere else. It doesn’t always work, but the other day I came across a list of ‘10 life lessons learned from hitchhiking’ and intrigued, I read on. I’m not sure what I thought it would be, a zine? A poster? A zen text? But as I looked at it I thought, ‘That’s a newsletter, if ever I saw one!’

So, here are the life lessons I learned from hitchhiking.

For context, I lived in New Zealand for about a year in 2007 and for some reason adopted hitchhiking as my primary mode of transport. I ended up covering about 8000km in this fashion and had some weird and wonderful adventures. Whether any of this is still relevant in terms of a) what hitchhiking is like today, or b) the extrapolations I’ve made from the experience, I’ll leave up to you. It’s just a fun list of my own observations from about sixteen years ago, with some slight interpretation.

10 Life Lessons I Learned From Hitchhiking.

1. I can talk to anyone about anything for about an hour.

You meet a lot of different folk on the road and as they’re doing you a favour, you have to get on with them for a while. After that hour, I found that we’d either come to the mutual (and normally comfortable) conclusion that we’re just two different people and carry on in silence, or I could quite happily talk to them for hours. But either way, it’s nice to know I can always do that hour.

2. Appearances do matter.

Annoying, this one. And you don’t have to do anything about. You can resist it, or go with it, but it’s true. One morning I was waiting down road, around the corner from of another hitchhiker (etiquette dictates you go further on, so the person who’s there first is picked up first), but almost instantly I was picked up. I asked the driver if he’d seen the other guy who was waiting ahead of me? ‘Yeah, I saw him. He looked like a fucking axe murderer’. Yes, it was harsh, but it was hard disagree.

3. Smile and wave, it’ll be the next car that picks you up.

This was said to me by a guy who picked me up early on and it’s one of the best pieces of advice I’ve even been given. Basically, if the car passing you is giving you abuse and not stopping, yeah, it’s hurtful, but it doesn’t matter, just smile and wave back. The car BEHIND the car of dickheads doesn’t see the abuse you’re getting, they only see your reaction to it, and if that reaction is negative, they obviously won’t want to stop either. If they see you being nice, but for some reason still being ignored by other motorists, they are way more likely to pick you up. This has served me well for pretty much all online interactions.

4. Patience.

Speaks for itself, and it’s testing. But yeah, it’s probably a good test.

5. People with the least, give the most.

This phenomenon is fairly well documented, but it was made abundantly clear on the roadside when huge SUVs and mobile homes barrel past with a sneer, and the drivers of an overloaded and knackered hatchback, with seemingly no space at all, will reconfigure their whole vehicle to somehow get you on board. No man left behind. It breaks my heart.

6. Always carry water and snacks.

I stand by that. In any context.

7. There’s freedom in removing the obligation of a destination.

This was frustrating at first, especially if there is somewhere you need to be by a certain time, but once you realise that might not happen, you kind of become open to all sorts of other possibilities. What happens if I stop in this town tonight instead? Who do I meet? What do I see? I have to remind myself of this frequently in creating work these days. In the real world I like to wander, but in work, with increasing time restrictions, I sometimes become too goal oriented, and it doesn’t allow space for new ideas to come in.

8. Write a sign.

No one will read it, but it shows you kind of have your shit together and a vague plan. It’s more for yourself, to be honest.

9. Most people are alright.

You get some wankers on the road, but they are such a tiny minority of all the cars that pass by. Most people, even if they don’t stop, will offer a sympathetic smile of support. Again, we know this, but it’s nice to be reminded of it in such a physical way. The online world makes it feel like it’s ‘all wankers all the time’, but most people are just trying to get home from work after a long shift.

10. Instinct is nearly always right.

Yeah, you’ve got this. You know a shit-show from twenty miles off. There’s loads of stuff on the ground to make you question that initial decision and you compromise yourself with an external logic, but ultimately YOU know what’s right for YOU. Every time.

Here’s a photo of me on the road, sixteen years ago. I apologise for everything (the sunglasses, the goatee beard…), but I regret nothing.

Kon-Tiki

On a podcast I did recently, I mentioned that I loved reading travel books when I was younger, and about how they informed The Hard Switch. The Kon-Tiki Expedition by Thor Heyerdahl was probably the one that kicked it all off, so I thought I’d do a little isometric cutaway of it.

I also latterly read Erik Hesselberg’s graphic account of the same trip, Kon-Tiki and I which is essentially a graphic non-fiction book, and is a beautiful companion.

One For the Fans.

I’ve loved writing these newsletters over the last year, and my only regret is that I’ve not got to write more for you. They will continue to be free, but if you wanted to make a donation in the tip jar, you are now able to that. Absolutely no obligation, but I hope there will be occasional posts for paid subscribers only, to say thanks to those who’ve helped out.

So, if that sounds good, or you’ve just enjoyed the chat and wanted to help out a bit anyway, you can click below and I’ll do my best to keep you entertained and out of the weather.

Animated panel from Victory Point but French animation studio, What About Motion?

Thanks everybody. Lets get back to it, that coffee won’t drink itself, and I’ll be back with some more meanderings soon.

Owen D. Pomery.