The world keeps
making me revise
what I know.

I spent my twenty-third birthday alone on the coast of Spain. There was a beautiful sunrise, getting lost on a coastal trail, and a scuba dive I had not planned on doing.

I think about Spain when I need some courage. From the Scuba dive, I realised how much of the fear is in the head and if that we can keep a calm mind, we can do things that we think are impossible.

I went rock climbing in Norway. Speaking to the guide there made me think about the infrastructure beneath individual freedom and his professional choices to kayak, climb, live on the edge for a living.

We tend to celebrate risk-taking as a personality trait. But the ability to experiment, change direction or fail is also shaped by the systems around us. I keep wondering how much human possibility is unlocked simply by making the downside less catastrophic.

In Japan, what stayed with me was not one spectacular object but the accumulation of small design decisions.

Packaging, public spaces, interfaces, shops, movement through a city — so many things seemed to contain evidence that somebody had considered the person using them. Does culture shape design or design shape culture? The relationship as circular: culture shapes design, and design reinforces culture.

Switzerland made physical activity feel unusually ordinary.

Activities like - walking, cycling, swimming in rivers, hiking and being outside are a parth and parcel of life. What happens when environments make healthy behaviour easier instead of asking individuals to be disciplined.

Living in the UK turned independence from something I wanted into a part and parcel of life.

There were ordinary things — finding my way home, making decisions alone, building routines in a new city — that slowly changed my sense of what I could handle.

London in particular became less a destination than a place in which I was became more me. What happens when a person is taken out of their normal environment? How much of it depends on the person and not the change of environment - what they make of it?

Sri Lanka left me thinking about civic behaviour — the thousands of tiny actions that determine what public life feels like. A debt-ridden country with a history of civil war, it was remarkable to see how people treated shared spaces.

Cleanliness, consideration, order and the treatment of shared spaces can seem mundane. Collectively they become culture.

Georgia made the size of the world more tangible to me.

Old Soviet infrastructure was not history inside a book. It was concrete, scale, architecture and evidence of a political system that had once organised ordinary life very differently.

Travel occasionally does that: it reveals how small the version of the world inside your own head has been.