[Applause]
thank you very much
my name is Simon Parker I’m a
broadcaster and a journalist and a
travel writer and I am quite honestly
relentlessly Restless on a day-by-day
sometimes even hour-by-hour basis
I am wrestling with the the need in the
desire to be somewhere else now this is
quite honestly an affliction I really do
feel like I have some of the richest
feet known to man and while I feel like
modern society and modern culture wants
wants me and wants all of us to be in
one place that is the pinnacle of
happiness and contentment and to be
grounded all I ever want to do is move
when I’m moving I really feel like I’m
getting the most out of my life when I’m
stationary I really feel like I’m
beginning to stagnate almost it’s like
I’m wading through creative Treecko like
I’m cycling into gale force winds
absolutely yes as I’ve come around this
headland all of a sudden I’m no longer
protected and I’m being absolutely
battered by the Arctic chill whoa this
all began when I set off to hitchhike
around Australia and New Zealand when I
was a 19 year old and all I had was a
backpack stuffed with clothes and a few
hundred pounds in my pocket and all I
had was the very vague idea of just
wanting to be somewhere different
tomorrow than the place I happened to
find myself that day and I remember at
the end of my teens I was just so full
of angst and anxiety and and
restlessness and all I wanted to do is
just go to the other side of the world
and just see what was going on with my
own eyes so for a year I hitchhiked from
one end of Australia to the other and
then from the very northern point of New
Zealand all the way to the South and I
slept on beaches on benches I lived on a
commune I worked on a sheep farm on a
mussel barge and at the end of that year
I fully expected to return back to the
UK and like a lot of people who go away
on these young adult adventures to have
that wanderlust just somehow contained
within me and suppressed within my
personality well for the two or three
years that followed I did manage to
achieve that because it coincided with
me getting my first my first break
really as a journalist and a news
producer in the very busy and frantic
and often very exciting environments of
central London and I really felt like I
was actively involved in all of those
things that I felt I was missing out on
because I was dealing with reports
coming from all over the world however I
was simultaneously managing to conform
to the way I thought my life was going
to
lay out in a station replace with an
apartment friends and family around me
that’s how I thought my life was gonna
play out at the same time though I
couldn’t shift this lingering feeling of
imbalance in my life and I remember
speaking to friends and colleagues who
used to tell me how going to the same
place every day seeing the same people
having a novelty office mug and a salary
at the end of the month you used to give
them a feeling of contentment and ease
whereas honestly the whole thing just
massively served to freak me out I
remember just thinking to myself you
know is this the existence that I’ve
created for myself at the same time I
also couldn’t shift this lingering
feeling of FOMO the fear of missing out
and we hear that so much these days FOMO
and I remember how I used to work in the
newsroom in the middle of the night and
these reports used to come in and I was
just growing increasingly more jealous
day on day dealing with these reports
coming from journalists who were seeing
and hearing and experiencing a story
with their with their own senses and I
was sat in the newsroom dealing with all
these things and I just used to ask
myself why why am i sat here often in
the middle of the night dealing with
these reports when in theory I could be
out there myself doing what they’re
doing
so one particularly disgruntled late
night in the newsroom I quite literally
just pulled my debit card from my pocket
and I picked a country and a continent
totally at random Peru in South America
I then sent a very quick email to my
editor and I said I’m terribly sorry but
I appear to have just bought a one-way
ticket to South America and I’m leaving
in five weeks I’m not sure if I’m going
to come back thank you very much for the
opportunity
now that was in retrospect the most
important and most liberating few
minutes of my life it was the moment I
began to rethink and reconstruct my
pathway in life and the pathway I
thought I was going to take it was the
moment I decided that this feeling of
anxiety and restlessness didn’t have to
be perceived by me any longer as a
negative personality trait that I had to
suppress within me yeah my friends and
my family and most people in the culture
that we are a part of have opted to live
and work and reside in one place but I
figured then and I still do now that
until I do
or perhaps don’t find that same feeling
then I should channel this feeling this
natural feeling of restlessness into
something that can ultimately be
positive in my life I’ve gone on to
report from over 60 countries on six
continents and I’ve now been to over
half the countries on the planet and at
times it’s been quite honestly
incredible and exciting and exhilarating
at others it’s been really rather
ludicrous this is this is me describing
to a BBC World Service audience of about
300 million people about the joys of ice
fishing in the very high reaches of the
Arctic Circle in temperatures of about
minus 30 degrees and what I really love
about going out into the world and being
able to report on places like this is
just how creative you have to be with
your with your words in your adjectives
because you’ve got to remember the
people that you potentially broadcasting
to 300 million people around the world
people in Mumbai and Nairobi and San
Paulo and Lima I’m having to try and
describe to them this this place which
from most people is very hard for them
to fathom in their imaginations for some
weird reason I am just naturally drawn
to places that are really rather
inhospitable this is me in the Atacama
Desert on a story I was working on a few
years ago and this is the highest and
driest desert on the planet and this
place plays absolute havoc with the
human body my skin was dry my throat was
parched my eyes had lost all the
moisture in their eyelids it was really
disgusting horrible place and I remember
how the mucus in my face would coagulate
and become all sticky and horrible but I
am an absolute sadist for these places
because I keep going back for more
people who work in this industry and the
colleagues who are my peers in this
industry we discuss it and we really are
absolute gluttons for punishment I’ve
cycled across the United States so low
and unsupported and I’ve driven a tiny
rickshaw three-wheeled rickshaw with
just their seven horsepower from the
Himalayas all the way to the southern
point of India on both of those
occasions I was always totally amazed at
how interested everyone was in the
journeys that I was undertaking and what
I’ve learnt by taking on this nomadic
lifestyle is that there seems to be
something very human about someone who
is living nomadically with all their
possessions in a bag or on bags on the
back of a back of a bike which
immediately people just want to warm to
you and be nice to you and wherever I am
around the world I’m always surprised at
how human beings will always open their
doors or open their arms and try and be
nice to me wherever I am
that’s footage of me at the time rather
unsuccessfully learning how to become a
paragliding pilot in the in the
Colombian Andes and this existence has
not come without its its near-death
experiences and there was a moment as I
was barreling through the air I was
thinking to myself you know I’m falling
down this cliff I’m back onto gravity
and I’m about to break my back
thankfully after two or three seconds I
did realize that I had all my faculties
and I could I could touch my toes and
everything and and then I had to go
through three hours of embarrassment as
a group of local farmers had to then
come in hack me out of the jungle with
machetes as all manner of tropical
creepy-crawly was trying to invite
itself into every possible orifice and
and I was thinking to myself as I was
suspended there hanging upside down
tangled up in all sorts of horrible
things
thinking’s myself what on earth have you
got yourself into
surely maybe going back to the newsroom
he’s got to be a little bit more
preferable for this I’ve asked myself
that same question
on dozens and dozens of occasions and
not least when I followed a group of
sailors as they erase 7,000 miles across
the Pacific Ocean at the end of the
winter in 2016
now believe it or not that is a good day
in the Pacific and yeah for 28 days I
lived on board with a group of sailors
as they were racing across the Pacific
in the clip around the world yacht race
and it really does rank as the worst
month of my life however at the same
time as that being the worst month of my
life personally professionally it ranks
as a real great privilege to get to see
and experience places like that with my
own with my own body with my own eyes
and my own brain because that was what I
was really jealous of when I was dealing
with all these reports sort of foreign
correspondents back in the newsrooms of
central London and when I when I reached
the US coast after 7,000 nautical miles
of sailing I was emaciated I’d lost 10
kilos in weight through incapacitating
bouts of seasickness every single day
however when I got there there was this
sense of pride that I’d been able to
witness and feel what the center of the
Pacific Ocean feels and looked like
looks like and sounds like the roar of
the the waves is just so undescribable
but that is what I was always longing
for what I’ve realized though is that
when I’m in a mad rush and I’m chasing a
story and I’m full of adrenaline or I’m
frantically trying to get my tent up at
the end of the day I’ve realized that
this is my normality and this was the
normal that I was deep down always
longing to create for myself and while
the majority of people get that feeling
of happiness and contentment and being
grounded and feeling feeling at home
from bricks and mortar and a
geographical geographical location where
we can all have our friends and family
around us well I still do get that same
feeling but I get it from when my tent
is up when my bags are in some sort of
order
when my passport is in a zipped up
pocket and it’s dry because it’s not
usually dry when my clothes are packed
in some sort of order and my laptop and
my camera are fully charged and ready to
go that’s when I’m at my happiest that’s
when I feel most content so what am I
getting out with all of this rather than
just standing up here and showing off
about all these places I’ve been and all
these things have done well I do get it
I do understand that life gets in the
way for a lot of people and it’s not
practical for almost all of us to be
just gallivanting around the world in
this fashion
I do feel immensely privileged and lucky
to get to live my life in this way what
I hope my Universal message is which
hopefully all of us can adopt in our
lives is one of changing perspectives
changing perspectives on anything in our
lives that just doesn’t quite sit right
with us anything that gives us that
feeling of restlessness and anxiousness
and anxiety and makes us just keep
asking those age-old burning questions
of of what if what if I went to the
other side of the world and tried a
different career what if I invested more
time and energy into that friendship or
relationship what if I just tried
reading a different type of newspaper
because all I can tell you is that when
I reconstructed my viewpoint on the
thing that I previously perceived as a
negative personality trait this constant
desire to always be something else and
instead of trying to fight it decided to
embrace it well all I can tell you is
that I haven’t looked back since and
I’ve had a long long time to sit and
ponder this career choice while staring
out of plain windows I hope and I don’t
think I ever will thank you very much
[Applause]
thank you very much
my name is Simon Parker I’m a
broadcaster and a journalist and a
travel writer and I am quite honestly
relentlessly Restless on a day-by-day
sometimes even hour-by-hour basis
I am wrestling with the the need in the
desire to be somewhere else now this is
quite honestly an affliction I really do
feel like I have some of the richest
feet known to man and while I feel like
modern society and modern culture wants
wants me and wants all of us to be in
one place that is the pinnacle of
happiness and contentment and to be
grounded all I ever want to do is move
when I’m moving I really feel like I’m
getting the most out of my life when I’m
stationary I really feel like I’m
beginning to stagnate almost it’s like
I’m wading through creative Treecko like
I’m cycling into gale force winds
absolutely yes as I’ve come around this
headland all of a sudden I’m no longer
protected and I’m being absolutely
battered by the Arctic chill whoa this
all began when I set off to hitchhike
around Australia and New Zealand when I
was a 19 year old and all I had was a
backpack stuffed with clothes and a few
hundred pounds in my pocket and all I
had was the very vague idea of just
wanting to be somewhere different
tomorrow than the place I happened to
find myself that day and I remember at
the end of my teens I was just so full
of angst and anxiety and and
restlessness and all I wanted to do is
just go to the other side of the world
and just see what was going on with my
own eyes so for a year I hitchhiked from
one end of Australia to the other and
then from the very northern point of New
Zealand all the way to the South and I
slept on beaches on benches I lived on a
commune I worked on a sheep farm on a
mussel barge and at the end of that year
I fully expected to return back to the
UK and like a lot of people who go away
on these young adult adventures to have
that wanderlust just somehow contained
within me and suppressed within my
personality well for the two or three
years that followed I did manage to
achieve that because it coincided with
me getting my first my first break
really as a journalist and a news
producer in the very busy and frantic
and often very exciting environments of
central London and I really felt like I
was actively involved in all of those
things that I felt I was missing out on
because I was dealing with reports
coming from all over the world however I
was simultaneously managing to conform
to the way I thought my life was going
to
lay out in a station replace with an
apartment friends and family around me
that’s how I thought my life was gonna
play out at the same time though I
couldn’t shift this lingering feeling of
imbalance in my life and I remember
speaking to friends and colleagues who
used to tell me how going to the same
place every day seeing the same people
having a novelty office mug and a salary
at the end of the month you used to give
them a feeling of contentment and ease
whereas honestly the whole thing just
massively served to freak me out I
remember just thinking to myself you
know is this the existence that I’ve
created for myself at the same time I
also couldn’t shift this lingering
feeling of FOMO the fear of missing out
and we hear that so much these days FOMO
and I remember how I used to work in the
newsroom in the middle of the night and
these reports used to come in and I was
just growing increasingly more jealous
day on day dealing with these reports
coming from journalists who were seeing
and hearing and experiencing a story
with their with their own senses and I
was sat in the newsroom dealing with all
these things and I just used to ask
myself why why am i sat here often in
the middle of the night dealing with
these reports when in theory I could be
out there myself doing what they’re
doing
so one particularly disgruntled late
night in the newsroom I quite literally
just pulled my debit card from my pocket
and I picked a country and a continent
totally at random Peru in South America
I then sent a very quick email to my
editor and I said I’m terribly sorry but
I appear to have just bought a one-way
ticket to South America and I’m leaving
in five weeks I’m not sure if I’m going
to come back thank you very much for the
opportunity
now that was in retrospect the most
important and most liberating few
minutes of my life it was the moment I
began to rethink and reconstruct my
pathway in life and the pathway I
thought I was going to take it was the
moment I decided that this feeling of
anxiety and restlessness didn’t have to
be perceived by me any longer as a
negative personality trait that I had to
suppress within me yeah my friends and
my family and most people in the culture
that we are a part of have opted to live
and work and reside in one place but I
figured then and I still do now that
until I do
or perhaps don’t find that same feeling
then I should channel this feeling this
natural feeling of restlessness into
something that can ultimately be
positive in my life I’ve gone on to
report from over 60 countries on six
continents and I’ve now been to over
half the countries on the planet and at
times it’s been quite honestly
incredible and exciting and exhilarating
at others it’s been really rather
ludicrous this is this is me describing
to a BBC World Service audience of about
300 million people about the joys of ice
fishing in the very high reaches of the
Arctic Circle in temperatures of about
minus 30 degrees and what I really love
about going out into the world and being
able to report on places like this is
just how creative you have to be with
your with your words in your adjectives
because you’ve got to remember the
people that you potentially broadcasting
to 300 million people around the world
people in Mumbai and Nairobi and San
Paulo and Lima I’m having to try and
describe to them this this place which
from most people is very hard for them
to fathom in their imaginations for some
weird reason I am just naturally drawn
to places that are really rather
inhospitable this is me in the Atacama
Desert on a story I was working on a few
years ago and this is the highest and
driest desert on the planet and this
place plays absolute havoc with the
human body my skin was dry my throat was
parched my eyes had lost all the
moisture in their eyelids it was really
disgusting horrible place and I remember
how the mucus in my face would coagulate
and become all sticky and horrible but I
am an absolute sadist for these places
because I keep going back for more
people who work in this industry and the
colleagues who are my peers in this
industry we discuss it and we really are
absolute gluttons for punishment I’ve
cycled across the United States so low
and unsupported and I’ve driven a tiny
rickshaw three-wheeled rickshaw with
just their seven horsepower from the
Himalayas all the way to the southern
point of India on both of those
occasions I was always totally amazed at
how interested everyone was in the
journeys that I was undertaking and what
I’ve learnt by taking on this nomadic
lifestyle is that there seems to be
something very human about someone who
is living nomadically with all their
possessions in a bag or on bags on the
back of a back of a bike which
immediately people just want to warm to
you and be nice to you and wherever I am
around the world I’m always surprised at
how human beings will always open their
doors or open their arms and try and be
nice to me wherever I am
that’s footage of me at the time rather
unsuccessfully learning how to become a
paragliding pilot in the in the
Colombian Andes and this existence has
not come without its its near-death
experiences and there was a moment as I
was barreling through the air I was
thinking to myself you know I’m falling
down this cliff I’m back onto gravity
and I’m about to break my back
thankfully after two or three seconds I
did realize that I had all my faculties
and I could I could touch my toes and
everything and and then I had to go
through three hours of embarrassment as
a group of local farmers had to then
come in hack me out of the jungle with
machetes as all manner of tropical
creepy-crawly was trying to invite
itself into every possible orifice and
and I was thinking to myself as I was
suspended there hanging upside down
tangled up in all sorts of horrible
things
thinking’s myself what on earth have you
got yourself into
surely maybe going back to the newsroom
he’s got to be a little bit more
preferable for this I’ve asked myself
that same question
on dozens and dozens of occasions and
not least when I followed a group of
sailors as they erase 7,000 miles across
the Pacific Ocean at the end of the
winter in 2016
now believe it or not that is a good day
in the Pacific and yeah for 28 days I
lived on board with a group of sailors
as they were racing across the Pacific
in the clip around the world yacht race
and it really does rank as the worst
month of my life however at the same
time as that being the worst month of my
life personally professionally it ranks
as a real great privilege to get to see
and experience places like that with my
own with my own body with my own eyes
and my own brain because that was what I
was really jealous of when I was dealing
with all these reports sort of foreign
correspondents back in the newsrooms of
central London and when I when I reached
the US coast after 7,000 nautical miles
of sailing I was emaciated I’d lost 10
kilos in weight through incapacitating
bouts of seasickness every single day
however when I got there there was this
sense of pride that I’d been able to
witness and feel what the center of the
Pacific Ocean feels and looked like
looks like and sounds like the roar of
the the waves is just so undescribable
but that is what I was always longing
for what I’ve realized though is that
when I’m in a mad rush and I’m chasing a
story and I’m full of adrenaline or I’m
frantically trying to get my tent up at
the end of the day I’ve realized that
this is my normality and this was the
normal that I was deep down always
longing to create for myself and while
the majority of people get that feeling
of happiness and contentment and being
grounded and feeling feeling at home
from bricks and mortar and a
geographical geographical location where
we can all have our friends and family
around us well I still do get that same
feeling but I get it from when my tent
is up when my bags are in some sort of
order
when my passport is in a zipped up
pocket and it’s dry because it’s not
usually dry when my clothes are packed
in some sort of order and my laptop and
my camera are fully charged and ready to
go that’s when I’m at my happiest that’s
when I feel most content so what am I
getting out with all of this rather than
just standing up here and showing off
about all these places I’ve been and all
these things have done well I do get it
I do understand that life gets in the
way for a lot of people and it’s not
practical for almost all of us to be
just gallivanting around the world in
this fashion
I do feel immensely privileged and lucky
to get to live my life in this way what
I hope my Universal message is which
hopefully all of us can adopt in our
lives is one of changing perspectives
changing perspectives on anything in our
lives that just doesn’t quite sit right
with us anything that gives us that
feeling of restlessness and anxiousness
and anxiety and makes us just keep
asking those age-old burning questions
of of what if what if I went to the
other side of the world and tried a
different career what if I invested more
time and energy into that friendship or
relationship what if I just tried
reading a different type of newspaper
because all I can tell you is that when
I reconstructed my viewpoint on the
thing that I previously perceived as a
negative personality trait this constant
desire to always be something else and
instead of trying to fight it decided to
embrace it well all I can tell you is
that I haven’t looked back since and
I’ve had a long long time to sit and
ponder this career choice while staring
out of plain windows I hope and I don’t
think I ever will thank you very much
[Applause]
Please follow and like us: