I keep whining about how unproductive I’ve been in these months following the walk – but it is a real problem. You see, the walk taught me that time is a precious commodity – in fact it’s the only currency in our lives that really matters. Everything else, we can get MORE of. Time is forever dwindling, and we only have an unknown finite amount.

So we should be mindful how we spend it.

In these past couple of months, I’ve been spending mine on trivial amusement, resting, healing. Yes, I’ve been productive, but it’s bursts of productivity, little sprints spread out between long periods of sloth.

So it’s time to snap out of that, I’ve decided to get up at 6am every day, and greet the dawn until I feel my head is on straight. That will give me an extra hour and a half or so every day to spend on exercise, reflection, jeez – basic hygiene. Anyway, a step in the right direction.

When COVID hit, my travel insurance company (www.simplytravelinsurance.au) was put into an induced coma .. hibernation .. call it what you want. I was going through my post-cancer struggles, and we just started to live off the money I’d put into the mortgage over the years. That’s starting to dwindle, but I still have a bit of time up my sleeve before we’re at real risk of losing the house.

So for the next few months, my focuses (foci ?!) are three-fold:

Personal Health: mental and physical – I need to monopolise on the gains I made in Captain Australia’s BIG WALK , not let any of the things I learned and the ways that I grew wither away. In my sloth, I’m regaining weight, and losing focus, so my declared intention is to remedy that.

Journal 84: continue, escalate and finish the write up of the walk. Yes, it started out as a morbid exercise, telling a story of who I am to my future children after cancer comes back and kills me. But it’s not that any more. I mean .. it still includes that, but now it’s about finding those themes of hope, healing, kindness and harvesting and sharing them for anyone who benefits. I love that there are people who got something from the walk.

Storybooks: I’m working on EINSTEIN & CAPTAIN AUSTRALIA SAVE THE WORLD, the first in a series of storybooks framed around people I met on the BIG WALK. I’d like to finish Draft One of the first book by the end of this month. I think I’ll give the books away for free – publish them in a way that whoever wants them can have them .. but I do declare total ownership of all rights and intellectual property, it’s all Copyright (c) Simon Harvey 2022, and Captain Australia ™ is actually a protected trademark. I don’t want anybody gouging or profiteering or anything.

But yeah, I’m pretty excited about creating some books that are fun, and deliver those themes – hope, kindness, lifting each other up, overcoming the shadow we see in the world around us. Here’s an example of some draft one words and images (being aware that it’s protected intellectual property, and that it’s also rough concept work at present):

I guess I love the idea of creating something that is fun, and that a child will hopefully enjoy. I don’t like the idea of commoditising it, making money from it – but if it were ever published my plan is to share profits with the individual included in the title (eg Einstein, Archer, other friends from the road) and The Kids’ Cancer Project, on a 50 / 25 / 25 basis. Going to ask a lawyer friend about how to memorialise all of that stuff. But free at the start. I think I like that.

I’m loving the process, I just hope the end product turns out well.

Oh yeah, haha, one other thing. When I rang my mate Einstein asking about some photos I wanted from him for the book, he sent me THIS:

Yep, apparently he’s been running around agitated to get me nominated as Australian of the Year, an idea that both shocks and amuses me in equal measure. He’s recruited the lovely Natasha from The Kids’ Cancer Project to get onboard – and he asked me to ask you .. if you got something from the walk, if you saw some purity or righteousness in the act – please consider nominating. (Haha, but if it actually did happen, some kind of recognised category nomination or something, I’d be mortified, and I’d also have the bizarre issue of figuring out whether I’m supposed to accept it dressed up as Captain Australia, or suited up as Simon – all my suits from my old life don’t fit me any more !)

They’d probably want Captain Australia – he’s goofy but he’s much cooler and nicer than me 🙂

Anyways that’s m’update – all the best to you.

Sometimes I’d be marching, tired & wet, but in my mind I’d have that old Hebrew proverb going over and over “Save but one life, and you save the World entire”. I guess for me, Archer personified that one life, although in reality the life I was saving was probably my own.

I’m delighted, absolutely delighted, to share (with his parent’s blessing) for the people following the walk, that Archer is out of ICU, where he’d been confined for more than 100 days. He’s in a halfway house near the hospital, and all going well, will be back in his own home imminently.

So yeah – the poster – the image above. With the help of my mate (Barry!), I thought it might lift Archer’s spirits to have a poster done up. He’d been stuck in the hospital, tubes, into his body, confined indoors, for months. We’d had a video call and I saw how ‘over it’ he was. I wanted to try and lift him up.

Here’s the thing, I don’t actually think I’ve been sorrowful (despite crying like a baby watching Archer’s video, plus a short animation I watched on Netflix “if something happens i love you” about death and grief. It’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s like … I changed, but I’ve come back to my life, and the world hasn’t. I feel out of step. As Bruce Springsteen sang “My clothes don’t fit me no more, a thousand miles just to slip this skin“

I’ve been over-eating, over-resting, idling along in neutral, but thinking about it, it might be a GOOD thing.

I think that the BIG WALK was me as a caterpillar – born from grief and sorrow and hardship, I had to change. So I started inching my way forward. Rediscovering myself and the world. Learning lessons.

That would mean right now, I’m simply cocooning up. Literally (wrapping myself in weight as I do nothing and slothfully gorge) and figuratively (by withdrawing a little bit from the world, emotionally and physically.

Using that metaphor, what happens next ?

The butterfly.

If my big walk taught me anything, it’s that broken things can be fixed, even a life. I think I’m a little bit broken now, but not too seriously. I’ve just allowed myself to fall into sloth after the walk, and it’s been hard to get the motor started again. But now, and for the rest of my life, I have this motivating memory. I did something. I think it was significant.

I’ve been working on journalling up the BIG WALK, something I didn’t do well at the time. I tried my best to do regular live-streams on Facebook (@CapsBIGWALK) letting people know where I was, what I was doing and why – so there’s a lot of images and video to go through. If you’re interested in reading, you can see the breakdown here, so far up to Day 8.

Oh incidentally, yesterday I achieved two things during my visit to the dental school (aside from letting a diligent dental student hone their craft with me as the crash test dummy, haha)

It’s been more than 2 months since I finished the walk, and in my sloth I’ve been regaining weight (inching back up toward 100kg again, although nowhere near where I was pre-walk (140kg). Radiation induced thyroid damage and being 50+, weight gain is no joke.

But now I have this little superhero character still alive inside me, so I can never slip too far. “WAKE UP SIMON”, I can almost hear him urging. “Get your arse in gear, mate”

I’m not broken, or at least nowhere near as severely as I was after my cancer treatments and subsequent decline, but I have allowed myself to slip somewhat. All good though, getting back on track 🙂

My focuses .. foci ? .. in the short term are:

I need to make money, I need to get in front of the mortgage and pay for my kids’ schooling and whatnot – but at the same time, I’ve decided if you don’t LOVE something, you simply should minimise it’s footprint in your life.

And aside from that – health. Walking. Walking. More walking. As I lose more weight, I introduce jogging, stairs, general athletics like clambering up and down over picnic tables. My goal is to put all this obesity and health stuff behind me. 100 days is the deadline.

So. Getting on track.

Sure, I did SUPERHERO UP FOR SCIENCE! but I haven’t woven that relentlessness into my day to day life just yet. I did bring back hope. I did get to keep many of my gains – like I don’t really morbidly dwell on cancer any more. And I have kinda fallen in love with myself. But I’m not a go-getting dynamo in a day-to-day sense (yet).

But I’m starting. And I think the key is … try and do what you love.

And do something meaningful, and ideally kind. Every day.