Look out! Watch your step. Be careful what you touch. Be careful. This is daily advice of the people of Australia. It is hard to say Australians because there are really a lot of immigrants. “Nobody says: Have a good time. Enjoy.” Everywhere you look, there might be something dangerous. Yet that never scared me, not even for a moment. Like most things in life. Until one day I walked down a colourfully paved path only to find a metre long black snake, that would not be bothered. I tried to ask if it was venomous but it just shook her tail and carried on meditating.
“Watch where you step!”
Warning signs on the beaches north of Cairns
“Go past me if you dare!” she hissed back modestly at me. I remember the last 100 metres of my first marathon. On the beautiful coast of Slovenia. With the last ounce of my strength, I had winked at myself and sprinted to the finish line. This is what my way home looked like after the encounter with the snake.
To accept. Not to expect. To breathe in.
To simply enjoy myself.
Was it venomous? If it had a yellow belly, it would have been extremely venomous. It was dark outside, so who would know. I just remember slamming the door. After deciding to travel so far away, one is always ready for … a new adventure, change, adaptation, information. One has to be. Otherwise, one does not get far, one is not happy and one does not enjoy discovering new secrets that lie along the way. That is one of the little things I came here to learn. To accept. Not to expect. To breathe in. To simply enjoy myself. It is not as easy as it reads.
“Go past me if you dare!”
“Why am I doing this?”
The thrill of looking for a job quickly faded. Especially when I realised that for a while, I would not be doing what I wanted, knew and had mastered. When I realised that I was competing against youngsters who would settle for chicken feed. All they wanted was some company while drinking in the evening by the modest pool in the noisiest hostel in the town. When I realised that I had to leave my comfort zone, which I had so painstakingly built. The most common question, going through my head in the first month, was very simple: “Why am I doing this?” Surely, the easiest thing to do would be to buy a plane ticket and go back to the comfort zone of my green Slovenia. But I had not made it this far to find out that I was no longer 20 and that I expected more from life. I had known that already.
“I would persevere.”
I would persevere. Although I was told every day how difficult it would be. But why should it be difficult? Why should I struggle with change every day, when I could just accept the circumstance and keep looking? I would find something. Anything but waiting tables. I had never had to. And I would not now.
