My name is Simon.

In less than 2 weeks, I set out on an Epic Quest, the Quest of my lifetime. I will walk all around Australia in the service of a charity called “The Kids’ Cancer Project”.

This pilgrimage will take almost 2 years (or more depending on misadventure) and will span 15,000km+ traveled alone and on foot, sleeping rough, quite often unsafe. It’s aimed at earning public regard, showing that we can each “superhero up” for worthy causes.

It’s also very much a spiritual reckoning for me. An overt attempt to embody virtue – to embrace and refine my spiritual self. To solve the riddle of my life.

Soon I’ll be underway, and I don’t have too much more to say, so since this captainaustralia.online website is going to go quiet for a while, I thought I’d do a final post, and stumbled across a Facebook Article someone challenged me to write which I feel sums up some of my world views quite tidily. So let me share it here.

All my very best to you,

Simon (AKA Captain Australia)

This is my very first Facebook Article !

You’re taking away my virginity.

That’s okay though, because you’ve been destroying my innocence – that sweet little boy-child inside me – for years now, in a slow and subtle war of attrition.

That’s okay too though, because I know it’s not really on purpose, and you’d probably stop if you could. It’s just something society does if we let it, erode our sense of place, purpose and joy.

Let me first explain who I am and something that I’ve learned.

HOPE is absolutely crucial to a human life. We are all united in the shared existential burden of our lives. The restless search for meaning. The knowledge that we are all one day doomed to die.

Hope allows us to take that common human struggle and frame it in a joyful and optimistic mindset. Everything will be OK (it doesn’t matter exactly whether it is or isn’t, hope is the flavour, not the meal – it makes even a bad or foul-tasting dish more tolerable)

I had all but lost hope from my life.

Ugh. Let me try and compress this bit into two paragraphs, this “Who I am” part, written only because of the context it adds to “What I think” (that we all must re-learn to listen, be watchful and alert, and even be silent)

OK. Here goes. I left home when I was 15 years old to escape bad domestic situation, and walked a long way (Brisbane to Sydney) to live with my grandmother. This journey somehow unlocked hope in my young life, elevating me as a person. 30 years later I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and it broke me. I was a human ship-wreck, I fought my hardest, but cancer just remained this oppressive threat, darkening every day. My hope was dead, I was a walking ghost waiting to die. But one day I randomly remembered my walk as a boy, and this memory, this ‘muscle memory of hope’ drove me to plan and execute “Captain Australia’s BIG WALK”

I dressed up as a superhero to help an important charity called “The Kids’ Cancer Project”, but my primary goal was to come alive again, to rebuild hope in my life. I was a pilgrim, and this was my Mad Quest. Over 84 days, I walked the east coast of Australia, sometimes look at the sun motes through storm clouds over the ocean and weeping .. sobbing even .. not realising at the time that I was unpacking and processing grief, sorrow and pain that I’d been carrying along with me for years.

I finished my walk, but that’s a longer story.

It does give a certain context to what I want to say. My opinions are scaffolded by some profound fundamentals.

– Kindness is the antidote to sorrow

– Hope is the essential fuel for a happy and productive life

– Building hope can be like planting a tree together, the more people that share in the work, the stronger the tree and the wider the comforting shade it offers. It can shelter you from harsh weather, and even yield unexpected (and nourishing) fruit.

OK, sorry about all of that, I sure do make taking my virginity a long and over-wordy process don’t I ? My biggest thing though is never to preach, only to share.

Which leads me to the main message of this article: we need to, we MUST learn how to listen again.

Take a long, slow look around you.

Look at ideological struggle.

Sure, it’s NEVER been pretty, but look at how we engage now. You agree with me, or you’re racist. You agree with me or you’re transphobic. You agree with me or you’re a leftist authoritarian blah blah blah. So many bloody boxes to put people in, while at the same time saying that the goal is to do away with boxes, do disempower the labels !

I think it’s technology that’s changed us.

(As a species, I mean)

It’s changed and continues to change us.

There’s an immediacy to communication now. And an urgency too. People outsource the love in their lives to social media platforms, they conflate LIKES with love, SHARING with caring. They put value in perceived relevance, and what makes you relevant is popularity with the peanut gallery.

I think that’s created a very specific type of narcissism in us.

People talk about narcissism like it’s a trait of powerful people, but it’s not. It’s a vulnerability, a brittle-ness of the spirit. You pretend you are the best while secretly believing you’re the worst.

So we jump into (or create) conversations, share of ourselves, but not completely authentically (you know what I mean, all the things you won’t or can’t say, how heavily curated your online identity is, as opposed to just simple old rough-and-tumble lovable YOU)

And because we spend so much of our time online, these feelings, these approaches become internalised and part of our actual identity.

So please, I ask you, as the hour grows dark: take a long hard look.

Examine the conversations happening around you.

The viewpoints propagating around the world.

Consider your own caution (fear?) with regard to your own voice, the reluctance to say anything too heavy, or too confrontational, too inflammatory, and yet consider at the same time how much heavy, confrontational and inflammatory stuff is out there.

Don’t be reductive, don’t dismiss all of it as “noise” or “garbage” or it will blow over.

Start to really, carefully listen.

Do that for a month. Just listen.

What are the people really saying ?

Why are they saying it ?

I honestly don’t have a “What Next”, but I think listening is the first step in re-shaping how we engage to make it more successful & worthwhile for both ourselves and others.

Let me end with a challenge.

Once you’ve started listening, try and spend a year (yes a whole year) never, not ever, insulting someone, and always, every time, telling the truth. I don’t mean just “no lying!”, I mean, when you hear something that your heart or mind tells you is wrong (and you’ve been listening so carefully), explain, honestly and with hand on heart: WHY.

There are so many lies surrounding us.

Every day.

Politicians, the media, in society, they’re both meant to be sources of and arbiters of THE TRUTH. But when we start to listen, we begin to realise how completely off-kilter that is. And if we can’t trust the high & holy, how can we trust each other ?

By purposefully, and carefully building respect and consensus.

One person at a time.

By listening.