What I "Learnt" From Robyn Davidson

"The principle difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape( the narrower the margin, the greater the adventure). A margin whose width and breadth may be determined by unknown factors, but whose successful navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurer's nerve and wits. It is always exhilarating to live by one's nerves or towards the summit of one's wits."
(borrowed from Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)

"The self in a desert becomes more and more like the desert...It becomes limitless."

"Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment."

"In Pitjantjara and, I suspect, all other Aboriginal languages, there is no word for 'exist.' Everything in the universe is in constant interaction with everything else. You cannot say, this is a rock. You can only say there sits, leans, stands, falls over, lies down a rock.

"I had learnt... That before [the trip] I had wanted to possess people without loving them, and now I could love them and wish them the best without needing them. That to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and best of all, I had learnt to laugh... I felt invincible, untouchable, I had extended myself and I believed I could now sit back, there was nothing else the desert could teach me... That night I received the most profound and cruel lesson of all. That death is sudden and final and comes from nowhere."