Hic Sunt Dracones

You get handed a map, the paper seems ancient and its thick coarseness feels heavy in your hand. Taking your time, you open it with the utmost care. You mentally berate yourself as your hand starts to tremble with the expectation of the new frontiers that await you, endless possibilities. You take a final breath, open the map and – nothing. Nothing beyond what you see around you has been marked.

Imagine for a moment that your entire world has been reduced to that map. Anything beyond is unknown and uncharted, endless blank space with the words Here be Dragons written as a warning. Hollow words written by empty minds stopping anyone willing to brave the dark and expand their horizons. If you thought life was as simple as a straight line from the moment of your birth to the end of your days then you need a paradigm shift. Life's not a straight progression from A to B.

It's more of a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey-wimey mess.

Some days you combat the darkness with sleight of hand and a whole lotta levity and other days there are incredible people that you thank for the remaining scraps of your sanity.

Nothing worth doing comes easy and nothing worth having is free. There will always be dragons; forces unseen and unheard that’ll try and stop you. The road to the stars is a difficult one to travel but thankfully there are those few, those happy few who don’t let the fear of facing dragons stop them from putting one foot in front of the other in search of new horizons. Proudly they stand up and look their dragons in the eye and shout “NOT HERE”, “NOT THIS DAY”.

When Armstrong and Aldrin were charged with setting foot on the moon they didn’t look to the heavens and say “That’s too far!” There be dragons.

When Hillary and Tenzing stood at the foot of Everest they didn’t cry “We’ll never make it!” They threw away their map that warned of dragons ahead and started anyway.

Riaan & Vasti Manser freely admit that there were many days that they wanted to quit, but they didn’t and therein lies the rub.

You could make the argument that these names are gods amongst mere mortals, how could anyone expect to compete with that level of greatness.

I met two elderly ladies named Jenny Jones and Margaret van Tonder on 5 December 2016 and they stunned me. Jenny had saved up all her money to afford a ticket from London to Cape Town to visit her friend Margaret. Upon arrival, they simply reached the conclusion that they should do a road trip to Namibia. They have very little savings and only a beaten down Toyota but they set off anyway. Experiencing dangers at every turn, they ran out of petrol, had near misses with snakes, got lost, had a tyre blow out, but still they kept a smile on their faces. 

Ordinary people who ignored the signs that told of dragons because the experience of it was worth every setback.

So many times I hear that you wish you were the person to the left of you, or the person to the right of you. You look at their lives and wish it for your own. It is so easy to fall victim to our self-centred society, a society filled with empty minds and empty hearts. You wish for that one’s state, and that one’s art. But, you have mistook them all this while. They live with bread like you, they have wants, they’ve tasted grief and they too need friends.

Throw away your map that reads hic sunt dracones, face the unknown, face the dragons head on. I’ll not tell you to have no fear, of course you should be afraid. The unknown is scary business and the signs warning of dragons are all around you. 

Moving to a new career, making new friends, ending an old relationship or starting a new one fills us with trepidation and truth be told you might get hurt. But you cannot cloister yourself away, stop living your life because of what might happen -- for that is no life at all.

Instead, hold aloft your hands and reach out for a better tomorrow, for your impossible dream and don’t you stop; don’t you dare stop until the dark turns to day.

Come your tomorrow, you will tear that map apart and turn it out of service. 

HERE BE DRAGONS?! HA! You already knew there were going to be dragons. You also know that you have the power to slay them.

Reach for the stars. Not the ceiling.

The power is yours.