I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

by Maggie O'Farrell

What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

Because at twenty-one, it seems a perfectly feasible plan to leave and go all the way across the world with just a rucksack and no money and the promise of a place to stay. Because why not? What else do I have to lose?

Because at twenty-one, it seems a perfectly feasible plan to leave and go all the way across the world with just a rucksack and no money and the promise of a place to stay. Because why not? What else do I have to lose?

studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that “Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.”*

Professor Adam Galinsky, an American social psychologist studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that “Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.”*

We do what we have to do to survive; as a species, we are inventive in the face of adversity. Robert Frost said, “The best way out is always through,” and I believe this to be true but, at the same time, if you can’t go through, you can always go around.

Your lives are conducted with a constant background hum of potential peril. You begin to experience the world differently. You may no longer go for a walk and see a garden, a playground, a farm full of goat kids. You must always be tabulating and assessing risk: that pollinating silver birch, those food wrappers in the rubbish bin, those flowering nut trees, those gambolling dogs, shedding their dander and fur into the air. You school yourself, quickly, to keep your anxiety, your levels of vigilance tamped down, concealed, to maintain calm, to speak in a modulated voice, even when you are so gripped with panic that you can’t hear anything other than your pounding heart.

Your lives are conducted with a constant background hum of potential peril. You begin to experience the world differently. You may no longer go for a walk and see a garden, a playground, a farm full of goat kids. You must always be tabulating and assessing risk: that pollinating silver birch, those food wrappers in the rubbish bin, those flowering nut trees, those gambolling dogs, shedding their dander and fur into the air. You school yourself, quickly, to keep your anxiety, your levels of vigilance tamped down, concealed, to maintain calm, to speak in a modulated voice, even when you are so gripped with panic that you can’t hear anything other than your pounding heart.