Are you relying on others to recognise your needs?

A story. Trekking the AAWT a few years ago, we had look for water daily. Mostly we found water near the camp, sometimes a bit further and one day, we didn’t find any. It was getting dark, and the creek that had been pinpointed as having water had run dry. Back up the hill 45 min to the campsite and our last litre of water. We knew the next source was roughly 20km or 5 hours away the next day.

It was one of those rare occasions where our camp was near a fire trail and as luck would have it, a 4WD came by. The driver – after lecturing us of being in the bush unprepared – gave us 1.5 litres. We asked him if he had seen any water as he was coming from the direction we were walking? An adamant and confident ‘No’ was the reply. That meant we had to look at our options and come up with a plan B for the next day to get us to the next source that would not expose us to extreme dehydration, heat and exhaustion.

We started early the next morning and 25 minutes into the walk, we saw water coming down the high side of the trail and trailing across the road. No one would call it a spring, but it was a very steady trickle of clean and very drinkable water that came out from between some rocks and moss. It only took about 2 minutes to fill a one litre water flask - slow, but enough.

So what is the tagline? The driver didn’t know what was important to us, and so he didn’t see the water. It was outside his awareness because he didn’t need to rely on other water sources and he didn’t expect to come across someone who might need and rely on this one. There was no bad intention on his side.

What is the learning here? I cannot expect others to recognize and be aware of what is important to me. If I want to discover what is important to me and what makes my heartbeats count, I have to go on the adventure for myself.