Baking The Cosmic Cake

Finding and following our distinct joy-recipe. Wishing I was laying on a foreign pavement. Bukowski quotes. Campfires.

I haven’t been writing as much because:

1.) I was engaging in a big freelance writing project where I wrote some days from 8am to midnight. I lived my dream of shuffling around the house grumpily in dishevelled slippers drinking bitter black coffee and letting out groans reminiscent of a 90 year old man as I sat with my head in my hands at the keyboard. Like a real writer. It was terrible and perfect but the last thing I felt like doing to ‘unwind’ was more writing on my laptop. So I went to the mountains instead, saving the thought-rambles for later.

2.) I have loved this time period of ceasing the big adventures to re-ground and create some roots in my home city. But cities don’t inspire me to write in the same way that adventures in wild places do. I can only write blog scraps about the ashtrays in dive bars so many times before realising that the anecdote to my stiff words lays in a remote pine forest that begs to be visited with a blank journal in hand.

I guess also, I was feeling pretty tetchy and stuck and in need of a remedy because, now I’m in living in the suburbs when for the past few years I’ve been

Living on Foreign Pavements

For the past five years, I have settled deeply into a state of constant unsettling. ‘Home’ has dramatically shifted between remote bungalows on Laotian rivers, tents in the woods, caravans by remote oceans, the drivers seat of my car flattened down and bunk bed number 8 in Nepalese hostels. I have had no fixed address, my SIM card is forever changing and my neighbours have ranged from British men in Thailand on a 24/7 tequila diet, to monks, cows and Indian granddads. All of whom I shared some kind of morning routine with (the Indian granddad would read the The Times of India as I sipped my 9am chai, the British man would inform me of his latest tinder date if I hadn’t already heard it through the shared wall myself, the monks would offer me slices of fresh watermelon and the cows would bid their hellos through surprise horn stabbings of my left butt cheek).

The point is, my life, for five years, has been an odd patchwork of constant flux and I’ve gotten used to it that way.

I have learnt to feel right at home sleeping on a foreign pavement, my backpack a pillow, my skin a home for swarming flies, as I wait for a bus that may never come for me. I have grown comfortable speaking the language of laughter in foreign places, putting my life inside and then outside of boxes twenty times over and sinking my hands into food that I will never be able to pronounce. I have learnt to wear that special feeling of arriving somewhere completely new like a coat- I wrap the sound of foreign hooters tenderly around me as I look for an airport taxi, knowing that my only goal at present is to find a warm bed to sleep in for the night because of course, I haven’t booked one yet. This, to me, is comfort. The foreign pavement, home.

So, returning to my childhood home in the quiet and familiar suburb of Pinelands, with no direct travel plans, no Vietnamese stranger to share my coffee with and no bus to take towards the next great unknown as I fight off motion sickness like I’m in a UFC ring has been nothing short of terrifying. Suburban stability scares the shit out of me.

Sometimes, I still wake up and instinctively whip my hand underneath my bed to check that my backpack with all my belongings has not been stolen by the dodgy Swedish guy snoring next to me in the 12 man dormitory. Then I rub my eyes and remember. There is no backpack, there is no Swedish man and the streets of Nepal are no longer roaring with life on the other side of the window. Instead, I have a meeting at 12, a dentist appointment at 3, a text from my mechanic (its bad news, again) and the knowledge that I will be staying in the same bed tonight, and then the next night, and then the next night.

It’s the stuff of nightmares, really.

But I Knew Just The Remedy

Luckily, whilst my travels left me with various skateboarding scars, a Polo Vivo on the verge of imploding and almost no money left in my bank account, it granted me the single greatest gift to carry me forward: the knowledge of what I really love. When they say that travel ‘helps you discover yourself’, they’re being boringly cliche, but they’re also being bang-on correct. It does.

I fell in love with coffee on the streets of Hanoi, the smell of it catapulting me into a joy that can only be etched with beans. Living in a remote South African village, my only companion was often music and so I observed as my love for the folk and rock of it all washed over my sadness like the waves of the untouched shores I slept upon. The Pine Trees of Northern India grounded me with its sweet earthy scents, one sip of the air and I was quenched. Around campfires I felt deeply held by strangers and the philosophical ramblings we merrily shared, beside the stray fire logs I felt the type of satisfaction that I had spent years searching for underneath desks in lecture halls and on the dance floor of clubs, much to no avail, of course.. The seed for my love of hiking was planted when I roamed, lost, in a thunderstorm amongst Nepal’s famous peaks: hungry, tired, bleeding profusely from my left foot and utterly high on the spirit of mountain-adventure.

Travelling cheekily shoved all the things I truly love about life right into the dirt-decorated palms of my hands. It revealed to me, me.

It made me realise that some strange way, I believe that every human has their own distinct recipe for joy. For some people, it is the throes and intricacies and grit of motherhood. For others, it is found in the ambitious currents that flow in a bustling corporate office. Some people find it in vintage railway trains, in shiny cosmetics, in Landrovers, in pot plants. Some people hear the distant howl of what they love their entire lives but choose to decline the call because often what soul-pulls us is crazy and niche and weird and inconvenient.

Travelling helped me find my distinct joy-recipe and I’ve learnt that the wisest thing I can possibly do for my sanity, inner fulfilment and physical health is to hold onto that recipe like my life depends on it. Because it does. The one thing I keep learning, and the one thing I keep preaching about like an old crazy lady standing drunk and unstable on a public park soapbox, again and again, is: go towards what calls you and fills you on a soul level, no matter how crazy.

Mostly because not being who you really are feels like wearing shoes 5 sizes too small.

And being who you really are, well, there’s no freedom like it.

So, in order to get out of my recent slump, I decided to do something out of the ordinary for myself: I followed my own advice. This meant directly running, unfettered, into the comforting arms of

My Joy-Recipe

1 x long solo roadtrip equipped with belting out the same King of Leon song again and again much to the earshot-misfortune of stray hitchhikers on the N2

8 x campfire conversations wherein no topic, no matter how whacky, is out of the question. (Potential campfire topics: reincarnation, quantum physics, Jesus, best vegetables, worst vegetables, pop culture psychology, Rosa Parks, the rise and fall of the matcha latte, death)

3 x solo forest wanders, sometimes called a ‘hike’

10 x communities of both likeminded and not so likeminded people to share the joy with

1 x stargaze

3 x freezing swims. One in a dam, one in a river and one in an ocean. They say that variety is the spice of life.

5 x running, breathless, with thorn-embedded feet to catch the sunset

20 x warm cups of coffee. Shitty coffee. Pretentious coffee. Rich coffee. Sweet Coffee. In-my-hand as I drive through the mountains coffee. Oat Milk Coffee. Process-my-existentialism coffee

100 x music, a lot of it, at a volume flagged as dangerous for my eardrums and central nervous system

50 x old books to read in the rain, sun, upside down and concerningly, during particularly bad traffic

100 x writing, writing on my hands, on napkins, on divebar bathroom stalls, in my journal, on my laptop and in my head during the hikes mentioned earlier. It is the thing which brings me a hot oxymoron to devour on a plate: fire and peace, all at once.

357 x questions to ask tolerant strangers. My curiosity sustains me, always.

4 x trips to quiet, remote nature, where rogue rivers, rainfall and the chorus of the forest are forever the headlining acts

1 x dose of adventure-vagabond-travel. Meaning, going somewhere new, having no plan, misreading the map, living out of a suitcase that could excitingly get stolen by a Swedish man at any moment.

Two weekends ago I left Cape Town, with a stress-induced twitch in my right eye, feeling antsy and frustrated. I dragged my twitchy self onto a roadtrip to follow the whim of the recipe. There, in the forests I love, I doused myself in vital doses of beach sprints, campfires, hippie hugs and hikes. When I returned back to the city, I felt restored and like I might sing instead of cry in the dentist’s chair.

Every time I find myself lost in some type of vaguely harrowing or blatantly harrowing psychological trench, every time I find myself thinking “what the hell do I do with my life now”, or even “what do I do with my day?”, every time I wonder what to run towards next, the answer always comes back to, again and again, the joy-recipe.

If you haven’t quite yet grasped your own joy recipe, here’s what I would recommend

1. Go back to being five years old, six years old, seven years old. What brought you joy back then? Someone wise once said that coming back to whatever this is will bring the dharma-satisfaction and success in life.

2. If you had two months to live, what would you fill your days with?

3. If you had to live the same day over and over for the rest of your life, what would you do with that day?

4. If money was no object and you could get any certification with the snap of your finger, what job would you do? Nothing is off limits.

5. Can you think of a moment where your heart was ecstatically on fire but you also felt a deep peace, and not because of another person. What were you doing then? Where were you?

Something important to note: all this advice comes from someone who bought the book ‘How to Manage Your Money like a Fucking Grownup’ and then lost the book 8 days later and had to buy 6 coffees and a book about travelling Afghanistan to console myself about it. Never come to me for financial advice. In fact, if you followed my advice you’d probably end up poorer. But maybe slightly richer in the ‘life rich’ type of way Bob Marley spoke about. But also maybe on the side of a highway somewhere in Asia, with a broken motorbike, wondering with palpable disdain, how you ended up here.

Another thing to note: if my parents had been the type to force me to do a Bcom degree somewhere fancy or hadn’t let me drop out of university, it probably would have taken me a lot longer to find my truth. Luckily, they are the type to simply shrug their shoulders in surrender when I say things like ‘I’m packing up all my things to go and live in a tent for six months to attend campfire university’.

This ‘joy recipe’ advice also comes from someone who is notoriously bad at following recipes. I once gave my whole grade a tummy ache from selling ‘herb popcorn’ that I made by dumping entire jars of herbs into a pot with corn because ‘it felt right’. I have gotten my own joy-recipe wrong many times. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to be famous. I wanted to study at Oxford. I wanted to be a model. I wanted to fit in with a group of people who liked to rev sports cars and would visibly gag at the mention of a hike.

I forgot about the fact that when I was 8 years old I didn’t want to play with the other kids, or run after the ice cream truck or pick up a barbie. All I wanted to do was sit in front of the computer and write. I forgot that I feel most free in the confines of an aeroplane. That my eyes light up when I talk about sitting on a dishevelled street bench in India. That I feel most myself when I’m in my scruffiest form, roaming the forests like a lost ogre. That I feel most inspired when I’m surrounded by people who are stoked on nature and wholesome adventures. I forgot that actually, I just want to listen to the cheesy brand of folk music from 2011, surrounded by a pile of old books somewhere quiet.

It’s okay to go off course and forget your recipe in the back of the kitchen cabinet for a little while. But remember to come back to it. You have to come back to it because I really believe that the universe has crafted a specific combination of ingredients that are made just for you.

And we should all eat our cosmic cake, while we can.

Quotes of The Day

“When we were living in squalor, wasn’t it heaven? Eventually, terrible memories turn into great ones. So if they call you, embrace them” - that one Tame Impala Song

“If you see me grinning from my blue Volks, running a yellow light, driving straight into the sun, I will be locked in the arms of a crazy life” - Charles Bukowski

Interviewer: Are you a rich man? Do you have a lot of possessions? Bob Marley: I don’t have that kind of riches. My riches is life, forever.