Week Fourteen: K’gari and the Beaches of Queensland

LOCATIONS

• Noosa, Australia (Jan 15 – Jan 18)
• Rainbow Beach, Australia (Jan 18 – Jan 19)
• K’gari, Australia (Jan 19 – Jan 21)

ACTIVITIES

Noosa

Our time in Noosa was composed primarily of running, exploring the amazing beaches, and watching some sweet sunsets. As we have continued north in Queensland, the weather keeps getting hotter and hotter. Most of our days have been 85-90+ degree heat (I think we peaked at 98 one day) and high humidity. After every run (which, keep in mind, have all ended before 8 am) it looks like I’ve taken a shower with the amount of sweat running down my body. I don’t think I’ve ever loaded so much sunscreen on in my life and I’ve still managed to get red a few days. Given there weren’t any major “activities” that we did, I don’t feel a need to say much more about this one. Here’s some pictures.

K’gari Tour

(this week’s cover photo – Maheno Shipwreck)

This was the big activity of the week. I knew pretty little about what to expect outside of exploring the island by car, and it was way cooler than what I had pictured in my head.

K’gari is the largest sand island in the world. The 75 mile beach (yes, you read that right) is the highway, and it runs nearly around nearly the whole island. The middle of the island is filled with rainforests, lakes and streams all filled purely from rainfall. Wild dingos inhabit the island. We had a whole safety briefing on how to stay dingo safe, and there are numerous signs throughout the island reminding us to stay in groups and what to do if we saw one.

Our tour group was 4 cars of 8, and I was the only guy in my car (I think there were maybe 8 guys total in the whole group). The running joke has been that the gals and I are the four sisters, so on this trip our numbers doubled and we became the eight sisters. They were all great and we had a fun dynamic in the car, but I think three sisters is enough for me. We spent our three days driving down the beach and seeing some of the highlight spots on the island. The beach isn’t actually swimmable here due to large riptides, jellyfish and sharks (though we spent all day looking to spot one and had no luck) so all the water spots we went to were lakes and creeks.

As beautiful as all the spots we went were, I think the highlight of the trip for me was just driving on the beach. I’ve never driven in sand before. It felt a lot like snow driving except a lot safer given there isn’t much of anything to crash into on a beach. I couldn’t throw the car around quite as much as I wanted to (something about safety of others, following our guide Hunter’s rules, blah blah blah), but slipping and sliding around in the sand while singing along to tunes in the car had me laughing and smiling every second I was driving.

Other highlights include an amazing sky full of stars (rivaling the one from the mountains a few weeks back), a nice sunrise, a few really good conversations, and seeing several dingos roam around (One even stole someone’s shoe! Thankfully it was recovered a few minutes later). It was a long and hot few days, but definitely one of the highlights of Australia.

REFLECTIONS

Observations on Anxiety

This is a bit of a continuation from last week’s reflection on processing. I’m not generally an anxious person. Sometimes in the past, I’ve struggled to understand it when people close to me are experiencing anxiousness. This week however, I had a few incredibly anxious days. I was stuck in some worst-case scenario thinking and was having a tough time re-routing my thoughts. It turned into an interesting space for reflection as I tried to pick apart what was going on in my brain and how to do things differently.

I wish I had some clear answer for “how to deal with anxiety”, but unfortunately it’s a lot more complex than that. But I did want to share some of my observations from those days. Keep in mind these are abstracted observations from my personal experience as someone without any form of clinical anxiety, but my hope is that some of them are helpful to a wider audience than myself.

• Many of my anxious thoughts start by making up a story about what someone is thinking about me, or attaching meaning to every single interaction. I read between the lines, except I insert entire paragraphs of nonsense that was never there in the first place. I’ve had to work to find the stories I’m telling myself, then verbalize them or write them down. It’s easier to see the elaborate stories for what they are when they’re in front of my face instead of hidden in my head.
• Anxiety feeds on isolation. Don’t let it.
• Movement is the greatest combatant to anxiety. I say that fully recognizing that anxiety has a way of making it incredibly difficult to move. By movement I don’t mean going for a walk (although, honestly, that would probably do some good). I mean taking a step towards the core of the anxiety. We need a way of challenging our thought processes to change them. Without movement, we stay too distanced from the source to give ourselves the opportunity to see that what we thought was a snake was really a rope. In the vast majority of situations, you will not compromise your physical safety by moving (although it might feel that way). Trust this is the case and take a step somewhere. Literally anywhere. Just stop standing in the same spot and you’ll have a slightly different vantage point than you did before.
• A great way to stop making assumptions is to go challenge the assumption you’re making. If you think your friend or partner is upset at you, go tell them what you’re thinking and why. They might actually be upset at you. If they are, you get to step into a conversation and talk through the actual issue. Or, what I have found to be more likely, they aren’t actually mad and now you know. Obviously use some discretion with who you choose to have a conversation about these things with, but if you’re having anxious thoughts about someone you have a healthy relationship with, I can tell you with confidence that they don’t want you having anxious thoughts just as much as you don’t. They might be able to slow down your spinning if you let them.
• At a certain point, I have to trust what people tell me. If I ask someone if they are mad at me and they say no, I have two options. One is to not trust them and carry on believing they are mad at me now with the additional pressure that they aren’t willing to tell me about it. OR, I can choose to trust that if they were mad at me, they would have told me. Trusting those types of statements is difficult for me, and I need to continually choose it. It doesn’t change my thought process immediately, but as I keep choosing trust, the anxiety slowly breaks down.
• There’s probably something that altered your thought process in the first place. You internalized something in one situation (or multiple), and now apply that lens to every situation that looks the faintest bit similar. If you can find that root, you can begin to remind yourself that X is not Y.
• Try to remind yourself of evidence in the opposition. If you are anxious someone doesn’t like talking to you, but continues to ask questions, they probably aren’t repulsed by the thought of you. If you are anxious about public speaking but you keep getting asked to speak for things, people probably aren’t listening to you and laughing thinking about how bad you are at it.
• People can (and do) have a million other things going on in their own head causing them to act in a certain way. Just because they aren’t acting the way you want them to doesn’t mean you’re the cause of their behavior.
• Give yourself (and others) grace in the anxiety. Your thoughts aren’t going to change immediately. It’s a slow process re-routing thoughts that have very ingrained paths, and some days are just difficult.

Apparently songs have really been hitting me the last few weeks. A few days ago I rediscovered a song called What If by Cody Fry that I really enjoy. Go give it a listen. It’s a beautiful song that frames anxiety in a way that feels honest and also presents a way of countering the thought process. In an interview about his song, Cody had this to say –

“Anxiety is looking at the worst possible outcome of any given situation. If you’re going to do that, you have to also acknowledge that there is a best possible outcome.”

My hope is that we can all take a step away from our anxious thoughts towards peace and freedom.

NEXT UP

My few weeks of traveling with my sisters has sadly come to an end, and I’m back to solo cruising. We said goodbye to Claire as she flew home a few days ago, and Amy and Becca are taking a slightly different route up the rest of Queensland than I am. We’ll have a bit more overlap later next week and hopefully some in New Zealand, but primarily I’ll be running on my own for the next while. As we all split again, I’m feeling very grateful that the gals were willing to adopt me for a few weeks. It was a very refreshing and needed change of pace.

This week is my last week in Australia, and it’s crazy that I’ve been here for nearly a month (and away from home for 14 weeks now. Whoa). I just jumped on a boat for a 3-day diving trip on the Great Barrier Reef, and then I’ll have a few days to chill in Cairns before I fly to Auckland, New Zealand on the 30th.

As always, if you know anyone that you think would be interested in anything I’m writing about, I’d ask that you consider sharing this with them.

Thanks for being here. Talk to you next week.

– Trevor