In Stubborn Pursuit:

Of things that are slightly unsafe, risky by yourself, physically challenging.

photo by the author

I didn’t think I was daring at all. In fact, I often chastised myself for being reticent and not taking chances. My mother often advised the low risk-options in life: Better to be safe than sorry. Don’t take chances. Follow the well-worn path. Choose the certain outcome. 

And the few times I made my mind up differently than my mother’s choice, I was told I was being ‘stubborn’. “Sabrina”, I would hear my mother tell her friends while rolling her eyes, “makes up her own mind sometimes, and won’t back down“. Like it was a bad thing. 

The voice in my head that was my mother’s was filled with don’ts and doubts: Are you sure you can go that far? Isn’t it too late? Can you commit to that? Are you sure what you are wearing will be sufficient: it’s not too short, long, young, old, hippy, preppy, bold? Have you already finished this task before you take on something else?

It took many years away from home to hear my own voice: the stubborn one, the let’s take a chance one, and to feel it all the way through to action. 

Of course it wasn’t always my mother’s voice at all, it was my own inner voice; that one that some people call the reptilian brain, the voice that is there from the beginning, helping to keep us safe. The voice that from a very early age steers us away from danger; that has us pause before taking action. But as most of us know too, this voice doesn’t always mature with time, so the self-protection it demands from us isn’t always appropriate for our current skill set. We’ve grown up, but like our mother the voice is still protecting our 5-year old self. 

photo by the author

However, when I found myself standing at a train platform somewhere in a forest near the Italian-Yugoslav border in 1978 late at night, without my passport, watching a set of guards searching the train from which I and a few others had just been removed, I wondered if maybe my mother and the voice had been right. Maybe I shouldn’t travel by myself, maybe I should have gone with a group. Maybe also I should have noticed the additional 24 hours it took to travel by train to Athens from Italy, through Yugoslavia and around Albania. And finally, maybe I shouldn’t have let those cute Yugoslavian young men in my compartment convince me to put a couple pairs of new Italian jeans into my backpack that apparently they were smuggling from Italy. 

The four of them had come bursting into the small train compartment at the Venice Train Station. It was one of those compartments like they ride in the Harry Potter movies, where there is room for about 6 adults on two facing bench seats, and you put your baggage overhead. There is an aisle running the length of the car just outside of the compartment. The young men were chattering away, filled with excitement from what had apparently been their big day out in Venice. They were about my age, late teens, early 20s I think. Dark hair, light olive skinned, twinkly eyes, full of smiles and laughter and exuding joy. Admittedly, they were absolute catnip for this young female traveller. They had loads of bags with them and as it turned out, these bags were filled with many, many pairs of jeans.

We tried to make small talk, but we spoke very few common words, except the English words they had learned from pop songs, and of course Beatles songs, which we sang together. After a time, they unpacked their bags, and distributed the jeans among them, stuffing a few pairs each into their backpacks. And then they started miming to me about all the pairs of jeans they had, and would it be ok if they put a few pairs into my backpack?

Photo by Claire Abdo on Unsplash

I considered this ‘carefully’. I guessed they were only allowed a limited number of items and/or a currency value of items to bring back with them into Yugoslavia. Jeans were becoming a fashion trend, and very valuable, particularly as a symbol of western culture. They were probably planning to resell them back at home. If I had a couple pairs of jeans in my backpack, there is nothing actually wrong with that as I was a U.S. tourist and I could very easily have picked up the jeans in Venice as a souvenir.

Also, and I’ll be honest: these young men were cute and I wanted them to like me. I had been working for a family in London for the previous year and hadn’t had much time to spend with people my own age. Here was a carriage filled with my male peers. Of course they could put their jeans in my backpack!

A little time later the train stopped. The border guards got on, and collected everyone’s passports. All of us non-Yugoslavs were asked to leave the train. My main travel rule had been to never let anyone take my passport away. My very own rule, and, ok, my reptilian rule too. Now my passport was gone with the guards and I was separated from the train that held my backpack with all my belongings.

I had recently seen the movie Julia, and the scenes from Lillian’s border crossings during German wartime resonated in my mind as I shivered outside the border hut in my own vastly less terrifying version of a border crossing. I was thinking through various scenarios: who would I call if I ever got the chance to call? Who could help me? No one else seemed very worried however, so that helped keep me calm. Also, we were not in wartime Germany or any other wartime at that moment in Europe, so my rational brain was thinking I didn’t need to be worried. My reptilian brain was working overtime, obviously: How could I have gotten myself in this situation? Why did I let those boys convince me to put their jeans in my pack? Woulda, coulda, shoulda¹.

Of course everything ended up just fine. It almost always does. 

After checking and stamping our passports and letting us back to our compartments, the train continued on, quietly passing through the countryside overnight. I checked my backpack and everything of mine was there, except the jeans, which the young men had removed at some point.

The next morning, noticing I had no food with me (a result of my not understanding train timetables and the whole extra 24 hours problem), my new friends in our compartment showered me with food they purchased through the train windows from vendors at an extended station stop. As we rolled along through their countryside, they sang some of their local songs for me, and we did a lot of mime and guessing. They taught me the words for the crimson poppies and identified the landmarks we passed, now long-forgotten, but their kindness and joie de vivre has stuck with me over the years. All these things I would have missed if I had played it safe, travelled in a group, and moved with certainty. 

I’m not saying it was a smart thing to do, and of course I would never advise my kids or anyone to do what I did (sorry C & M!) but given that my decisions were all quite sensible up until that point, I’m not sure what I would or could have done differently. This was long before smart phones, and I travelled around using a Eurail train pass, paper guidebooks and maps, and paper train schedules printed in small booklets with tiny print timetables. 

Volksoper Station, Vienna

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was not the most exciting thing that happened that summer of travel. I was on my way to meet a family friend in Athens, where we would fly on together to Israel to join the rest of her family for a Bar Mitzvah. That part of the summer alone was the source of many reptilian brain meltdowns. After a lovely week with the family in Jerusalem, I spent some less lovely time with a few people I barely knew in the Sinai and Negev deserts, travelled on my own back to Tel Aviv via public buses, then flew back to Athens after another day alone in Tel Aviv. All of this is not something I would ever recommend to a young woman travelling solo. Especially when the politics, social dynamics and borders are now far more complicated and volatile then they were back then.

Travelling by myself as a young woman was a crash course in confidence and resilience for me. Since I very much needed to practice listening to my own voice, a summer of European travel by myself was a brilliant hands-on tutorial.

Over time, I have alternated between playing it safe and also doing what I wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes, not too often, I have attempted the thing that has no known outcome: the jumping off a cliff moment. If you are a scaredy cat like me, when there is guaranteed uncertainty and most surely some surprises to come, once the immediate fear has passed, and I am through the scariest part of the cliff-fall, I am elated. Mostly I’m astonished that it all worked out: I survived using skills and experience to get through it. So there, reptilian brain! Yet there are still those days when I’m not sure I have the confidence to go to a new social event in the next village. What will I wear? What if no one talks to me? 🤷‍♀️

From the things that were slightly unsafe (travelling by myself, particularly overseas) and the things that are risky (buying my own home), and even the things that are physically challenging (figuring out how to manage intense dehydration in the Negev desert): my life is incredibly rich from still having done all those things. I’m pretty sure the ever present see-saw of confidence and reptilian protection will continue…

Reaching the top, Joshua Tree National Park. Note: this trip I was not by myself and brought plenty of water. I do learn from the past, most times. 😉

And now how about you? I’d love to hear from you!

• Have you ever done the things that you weren’t supposed to do? How did you feel afterwards?

• Are there things you are particularly proud of having accomplished? Did you always believe you could do it?

• Did you ever get caught in a situation you wish you hadn’t done? (Goodness I have so many of those!)

• Does your reptilian brain still try to trip you up? How do you address it?

• Do you have a name for that voice in your head that tries to warn or stop you?

So many thanks for reading today!

Let me know if there is any topic you’d like to see written about here.

Also, if you’d like to write a guest post for me to share here-I’d love that! I’ll be taking most of August away from posting as I will be travelling (of course!), so if you have something you’d like to share here, please get in touch!

In the meantime, enjoy the mid-June summer loveliness!

xx Sabrina

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1. An expression that conveys missed opportunities or other activities that you would, could or should have done differently. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woulda,_coulda,_shoulda