The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot

A short, unedited version of this was published on Notes last year.

One of my more important learning experiences was when I was sixteen, and my best friend Christoffer and I biked from Sweden to the Åland Islands in Finland. We didn’t have any cell phone connection abroad, so my parents didn’t know where we were (and were admirably chill about that). And we weren’t allowed to stay on camping grounds, since we were underage (and also didn’t have any money), so we had to convince strangers to let us put our tent on their land.

On the first night, after biking for eight hours, we sat in a square in Hallstavik—a town of 4,000 inhabitants—feeling a bit depressed because we couldn’t figure out where to sleep. A man with a white van stopped and asked us if we needed somewhere to stay.

Christoffer said, “…yeah.”

The man, who said we could call him Biker Pete, knew a place further out into the woods. We could put our bicycles in the back. We said we’d bike after him rather than get in the car (we had heard stories of men with vans).

When we arrived in Herräng, the place he’d guided us to turned out to be a festival dedicated to Lindy Hop, a kind of jazz dance that was popular in the 1930s. Saying we were friends of Biker Pete, we were given a free pass and were invited to take lessons from a guy named Chester, who, we were later told, had choreographed the sword scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean. Jazz orchestras played late into the night. And since we were underage, an investment banker from London kept us supplied with beer.

Meeting people like this was all very exciting for two boys like us who had grown up in a small village—it made the world feel welcoming and large and full of possibility. Nothing was as scary as we thought, and everything was weirder and more friendly.¹

Our trip kept going like that: sleeping in gardens, getting invited in for dinner, and meeting all sorts of people we’d never have met otherwise.

It was very much in the vein of what Kevin Kelly writes about his experience bicycling from San Francisco to New York in “How Will the Miracle Happen Today”:

I started out camping in state parks, but past the Rockies, parks became scarce, so I switched to camping on people’s lawns. I worked up a routine. As darkness fell, I began scouting the homes I passed for a likely candidate: neat house, big lawn in the back, easy access for my bike. When I selected the lucky home, I parked my bag-loaded bike in front of the door and rang the bell. “Hello,” I’d say. “I’m riding my bike across America. I’d like to pitch my tent tonight where I have permission and where someone knows where I am. I’ve just eaten dinner, and I’ll be gone first thing in the morning. Would you mind if I put up my tent in your backyard?”

I was never turned away, not once. And there was always more. It was impossible for most folks to sit on their couch and watch TV while a guy who was riding his bicycle across America was camped in their backyard. What if he was famous? So I was usually invited into their home for dessert and an interview.

I was changed by the experience of meeting the people who invited Christoffer and me in. Our trip helped me realize that the world isn’t like one of those games with predetermined levels; it is a game of generated landscapes where the world keeps growing the further you go. You can go out and talk to people and do stuff, and the world opens up vista after vista.

Or, as Werner Herzog likes to say, “the world reveals itself to those who travel by foot.”

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Rereading the above, I realize how much of my life I owe to Christoffer. When we met, about ten months before the trip, I was very shy. Many of the things that my classmates did, like going to parties, gave me social anxiety; I preferred to stay home and read.²

Christoffer, who was also a bit of an outsider but more outgoing than I, would tease me and come up with various games and challenges to get me to do things that I was uncomfortable doing. One game was the chain-of-parties, where he would get us invited to some stranger’s get-together, and the rule was that, during the night, I had to make friends with someone who could invite us to something else the next weekend, where Christoffer had to find the next event. It was a bit like surfing the internet by clicking links—we passed through so many different social scenes. It was made even more instructive by the second rule which was that we had to do it sober.

This was, looking back, classic exposure training. I was afraid to go out into the world, talk to people, and do things, so we came up with playful ways of practicing these skills until the anxiety went away.

Several of my friends have played this role in my life—of pushing me out into the world. There was also Mattis, a mutual friend of Christoffer and me, whom we met a year after the bicycle trip. Mattis was, and is, a wonderful musician, and the first time I was at his house, he realized I was a bedroom guitarist, so he grabbed a guitar and put it in my hand and told me to play something. I was too nervous to play my own songs, so I did Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!’s “Upon a Tidal Wave of Young Blood.” After half a verse Mattis stopped me and said, “Why are you whispering? You are supposed to sing as loud as you can!” He made me play it over and over until I was screaming at the top of my lungs, after which he pushed me to perform for some of our friends, and then on stage, and later to blog and put myself out there, changing the trajectory of my life.

And then, at twenty, I met Viktor, who was a year younger than I and a serious socionaut, exploring the outer edges of what was possible in social space. Viktor was always conjuring small scenes and crafting creative social situations that made me realize how much more interesting life can be if you put some thought into it.

Viktor had boundless energy and audacity to start things. One instance that has stuck with me was when we were sitting at the café at uni, throwing around ideas, and he burst out, “That should be a TV series!!” Then he immediately pulled out his phone and started calling around, trying to get us a meeting with a production company. A few days later, we were at the offices of Swedish State Television in Stockholm, pitching.

What all of these experiences had in common was that they expanded my world. By tagging along with people bolder than me, I learned that it wasn’t dangerous to reach out to and talk with people and make stuff happen. You could be playful with it. It wasn’t dangerous to fail. The TV series never happened, for instance, but it didn’t matter, because now that move in social space was part of the game, and we could play around with it and see what would happen (a year later, we ended up securing money to do a feature-length documentary instead).

There is a loop here, which for me started when Christoffer and I bicycled to Finland:

1. You reach out to the world, trusting it, and

2. then you end up in situations and meet people who surprise you and expand your sense of possibility, which

3. gives you more landscapes to explore,

4. and so on and on.

I wouldn’t have ended up doing the projects I did with Viktor if it weren’t for Mattis, and I wouldn’t have dared to make friends with Mattis if it wasn’t for Christoffer, and my life wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting and filled with opportunity if it weren’t for all of them and the many, many others I’ve met because of them.

What I learned on our trip to Finland wasn’t about how to travel but how you can relate to the world. I learned that the world (like people!) grows bigger, more varied, and interesting if I’m open, playful, and trusting.

For more on the theme of friends, this piece is probably the best one I have:

Acknowledgements

This piece was greatly reshaped by a series of conversations with Johanna Karlsson. The copy edits were done by Esha Rana and the remaining mistakes by me.

1. I don’t mean to belittle the real danger that exists when you go off the beaten track and trust strangers in certain places. At 20, when I was in Bolivia, doing similar things, I met a girl two heads shorter than me who was hitchhiking from Copenhagen to Buenos Aires—that sort of thing takes real good instincts for when to get out of a situation! I wouldn’t recommend it. Even worse: another girl I met tried to bicycle through the Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan in the early 2010s, which she regretted dearly.
But generally speaking, people’s intuition for how unwelcoming and dangerous the world is tends to be wildly more pessimistic than the statistics warrants.
It is easy to overindex on scary, easy-to-visualize risks (like getting dragged into a white van) and miss the subtler risks (like fear shrinking your soul)! If you reduce obvious risks too much, you will never go on any adventures, and that’s very costly in the long run.

2. I don’t mean to indicate that this was a bad thing. I think the fact that I was isolated and had to entertain myself was instrumental in helping me think for myself. Being overly social often makes people conformist. But the ideal, to my mind, is to be both comfortable with solitude—so you can cultivate your thoughts and values—and capable of navigating the social world—so you can get stuff done and expose yourself to diversity and difference.