Dad Made An Announcement

I just finished reading Birdgirl by 19-year-old Mya-Rose Craig. It’s an understatement to say she’s accomplished.

As a birdwatcher, for example, she became the youngest person, at 17, to have seen half the world’s bird species.

Her book is a memoir of how she and her parents travelled the world in search of so many birds. It’s all a bit precocious really:

It didn’t come as a great surprise to my parents when, at eight years old, I announced that I would visit each of the seven continents before I was fifteen.

But then “precocious” is probably ageist. We wouldn’t say that of someone in their thirties or forties. Touching down on the soils of all continents is a beautiful ambition.

The book is good, though Mya has a careerist, even managerial, voice that I find a bit disturbing. She routinely uses phrases like “a solution-led manifesto” and “I was keen to take part” (examples taken from the same random page), so that the book reads a bit like a workplace email. But maybe young people have to speak officiously now. Maybe, against a background of economic and political urgency, they haven’t been able to develop less terrifying speech patterns. Maybe a performance in management speak, the only language our leaders will hear, is the rain dance necessary to tackle the climate crisis. I’m not sure.

Anyway, the happy passage I want to share with you is this one:

Dad […] made an announcement. From now on, we would change the way we lived. There would be no more unnecessary spending; if travelling was what kept our family together then everything we had or made would go toward such trips […] Dad was choosing experience over possessions; it was to become his mantra.

And so the Craigs decide to travel the world like some mildly dysfunctional (but loving and thoughtful) Wild Thornberrys.

I love a moment like that. I love hearing about the moment when the decision to change everything, to escape, is made. Do you remember yours?

Escape today with I’m Out!