The Story Beneath the Story

When I first sat down to write in 2016, I thought I knew what the story was.

I wanted to record a remarkable period of my life for my sons and, perhaps, for anyone else who might find something of value in it. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about becoming an author. I simply felt that I had reached a stage in life when I finally had the time to tell the stories that had stayed with me for so many years.

There were plenty of them.

Turtles coming ashore at night at Mon Repos. Long days and nights on Heron Island. Raine Island, remote beyond anything I had previously experienced, with turtles spread across the sand and seabirds filling the sky. Jersey Zoo and the animals and people who inhabited Gerald Durrell’s extraordinary world. London, Vienna, Greece, Israel and the Sinai. Later, the rainforests and escarpments of Binna Burra.

These were the stories I thought I was going to write.

Adventure. Wildlife. Travel. Conservation. The strange turns a young life can take when you keep saying yes to opportunities without knowing quite where they will lead.

Looking back now, I realise I was writing about something else as well.

As a young man, I never felt comfortable defining myself by a single profession or identity. My interests moved in too many directions. I studied landscape architecture, became absorbed in wildlife research and animal behaviour, pursued photography seriously and found myself drawn towards conservation. Later, my working life moved through tourism, business, education and music promotion, with several unexpected diversions along the way.

To someone reading a résumé, those changes might appear disconnected.

They never felt disconnected to me.

I was always interested in what lay beyond the edge of what I already knew.

Sometimes that meant crawling across a beach in darkness beside a nesting turtle. Sometimes it meant travelling to an island few people would ever visit, or arriving in another country without knowing quite what awaited me. At other times it meant walking into a new job in an unfamiliar field and trusting that I would learn what I needed to know.

Trust may be too strong a word.

I usually carried considerable doubt with me.

Throughout much of my life, there was a quiet suspicion that I had somehow found myself in places where other people were better qualified to be. I might be given a task or a new role and, quite often, see fairly quickly what needed to be done. I could usually break a problem into parts, work out a path through it and get on with the job.

The odd thing was that I rarely interpreted that as competence.

I assumed that others probably knew more than I did, or that sooner or later someone might discover that I did not really belong there.

Success tended to reassure everyone except me.

That feeling followed me through much of my working life, but it rarely stopped me. I became used to carrying doubt while moving forward anyway.

Fear worked in much the same way.

When I look back through the memoir now, fear appears more often than I expected. There were places I went, people I approached and decisions I made while feeling far less confident than I may have appeared.

I was not fearless.

Nor did I overcome fear in any permanent sense.

More often, I faced whatever was in front of me, made a decision and took the next step.

Sometimes curiosity was stronger than fear. Sometimes opportunity arrived before I had time to think too much about it. Sometimes I simply did what seemed necessary.

That distinction became important as I wrote.

I wasn’t searching for a career so much as experience.

I wanted to understand animals and landscapes, but also people. I wanted to know how other people lived and thought. I was interested in science, history, photography, architecture, philosophy and ideas that sat well beyond the boundaries of my formal education.

And, perhaps without understanding it at the time, I was also trying to understand myself.

When I began the manuscript, I expected memory to be the difficult part.

Instead, I found that memory behaved in unexpected ways.

A photograph could bring back the colour of a room or the position of someone standing in it. A name I had not thought about for forty years could suddenly return with a voice attached. An old diary entry might recover the sequence of events but not their meaning, while some apparently insignificant moment had remained perfectly intact.

The smell of an animal enclosure.

The feel of coral sand.

A conversation on a railway platform.

The light across mountains in the Sinai.

Small things had survived when larger things had faded.

Writing forced me to spend time with those memories rather than simply recall them.

At first, I tended to explain too much. I wanted to tell the reader what an experience had meant, what I had learned from it, perhaps even why it mattered.

Over the years, that changed.

The manuscript changed with it.

I became less interested in explaining what I believed and more interested in reconstructing the experience itself as accurately as I could. If something frightened me, I tried to remember the fear rather than convert it into courage. If I doubted myself, there seemed little point in giving my younger self a confidence he did not possess. If I made a mistake, I did not want to disguise it with the wisdom of hindsight.

The young man in the story could only know what he knew then.

Gradually, I learned to trust the scene.

And to trust the reader.

That became one of the most important lessons of writing Learning to Lean Back.

A story doesn’t always need to announce what it means.

Sometimes a young man sitting alone on a cliff edge tells us more than several paragraphs about solitude. A turtle dragging herself across a beach can carry its own weight. A conversation with someone encountered briefly while travelling may remain important precisely because neither person knew it would.

Meaning often arrives quietly.

The longer I worked on the manuscript, the more I began to recognise patterns that had been invisible while I was living them.

For years, I had thought of that decade largely as a series of remarkable experiences. One opportunity led to another. A research project led to an island. A letter led overseas. One person introduced me to another. Plans changed. Money ran short. Doors opened unexpectedly.

At the time, life felt improvised.

Perhaps it was.

But looking back across it from a distance, I could see one thread running quietly through almost everything.

Curiosity.

It was there when I first became interested in turtles and animal behaviour. It took me to remote islands, wildlife sanctuaries, deserts and rainforests. It was there in the books I read and the questions I asked. It encouraged me to travel alone, to approach people whose work I admired, and occasionally to place myself in situations for which I was not entirely prepared.

Curiosity was certainly one thread.

As I continued writing, I became aware of another.

Doubt.

I had spent much of my life moving towards things while privately wondering whether I was equipped for them. Raine Island did not suddenly make me fearless. Travelling alone did not remove uncertainty. Meeting people I admired did not make me feel their equal. Taking on new responsibilities did not necessarily make me believe I deserved them.

None of that stopped me for very long.

Perhaps that, too, had been part of the pattern.

Not overcoming fear.

Not defeating doubt.

Simply refusing to let either make every decision.

It also made changing direction easier.

I never felt that moving from one field to another meant abandoning everything that had come before. Experience accumulated. Observation carried across. So did the ability to listen, to learn and to remain comfortable with not knowing everything.

Those qualities became increasingly important later in life.

Adrenomyeloneuropathy changed many of the practical circumstances of my life. Things that had once been effortless became difficult, and some eventually became impossible. My physical world altered considerably.

But I never felt that the essential person inside it had changed to the same degree.

The curiosity remained.

So did the uncertainty.

Perhaps by then I simply understood both a little better.

There was no great transformation in which I became completely confident in myself or untroubled by fear. Life rarely works that neatly. What changed was my willingness to accept uncertainty without assuming that it meant I should stop.

Perhaps that is why writing became so absorbing.

It offered another landscape to explore.

I could return to places that no longer existed as I had known them and spend time again with people who were young when I was young. I could look more closely at decisions that had seemed instinctive at the time and understand something about why I had made them.

There were surprises.

Some memories became less important as I wrote them. Others grew.

People I had remembered as peripheral emerged as significant influences. Moments I had barely considered when I began the book became essential to understanding what followed.

The writing also stripped away some of the stories I had unconsciously told myself about my own life.

When we look backwards, there is a temptation to impose order. We turn accidents into turning points and decisions into destiny. We give our younger selves intentions they probably never had.

I have tried not to do that.

Much of what happened to me happened because I was curious, restless enough to move, and fortunate enough to meet generous people who opened doors.

Sometimes I was brave.

Sometimes I was frightened and went anyway.

Sometimes I was simply too inexperienced to appreciate the risks.

There is a difference.

For much of my life, I thought I was searching for an identity.

Now I think I had already found it.

It was never the jobs I held or the places I travelled. It was never becoming a wildlife researcher, photographer, businessman, traveller or anything else that could be written neatly beneath a name.

It was the willingness to remain interested.

To watch closely.

To keep learning.

To step towards something unfamiliar even when I could not see where it might lead, and often without being entirely convinced that I belonged there.

That seems clearer to me now than it did when I began writing ten years ago.

I started Learning to Lean Back because I wanted to leave my sons a record of a part of my life they had never known. They knew the man I became. I wanted them to meet, as honestly as I could recreate him, the young man who existed before them.

In trying to introduce him to them, I met him again myself.

I don’t agree with everything he thought. I sometimes question his judgement. At other times I admire his willingness to go somewhere simply because the opportunity was there, often carrying fears and doubts that he kept largely to himself.

But I recognise him.

The curiosity is familiar.

So is the doubt.

If writing this memoir has taught me anything, it is that the stories we set out to write are not always the stories we end up telling.

We begin with events.

Then, if we remain with them long enough, something quieter begins to appear beneath them.

Not necessarily a lesson.

Not even an answer.

Sometimes just a pattern we hadn’t noticed while we were busy living.

Curiosity drew me forward.

Doubt and fear came too.

Perhaps the important thing was never that I conquered either of them.

I kept moving while they were there.