How do you join an expedition? Just lace up your boots and go! Because it is said that that Time waits for no Man, and we have felt this relentless march as 14 months of extraordinary times have come to an end.

Did we really do all of those things? See all those places? Go to all those countries?

Absolutely, but time marches on and we are left with nothing material except for old ticket stubs, a few photos and some hastily jotted down notes of impressions about the world around. But more memories and subtle personal changes that, perhaps even us, appreciate right now.

But here is the question: What is the "real" world? What is the "other" world? How often have you been away somewhere, getting away from "it" all? But what are you getting away from? What have you been trying to escape and what you dread going back to? Do you feel like you have had a little reprieve from your "real" life to the "other" life?

Since we have been away, we have seen the world lurch from credit crunch to recession and stare into the doom and gloom. But here is the thing: in many places of the world, that is not the case.

In many places, the recession and credit crunch and all its doom and gloom have no impact. In fact, they don't even register at all. Wherever we went life just carries on, contently.

Life carries on in the matter in which YOU engage with it. Certain conditions do not create happiness. Happiness creates certain conditions. The implication being that you choose whatever you want to create for yourself.

YOU are master of your world and what you create within it. You alone are responsible for it! Awesome. Empowering. Invigorating. But also a little scary when you have to take total responsibility for yourself; and fear is what holds us back and keeps us imprisoned within ourselves.

So the "real" world and that "other" world are, in fact, one and the same. It is just that we choose to see them as different; mythical even. It is a place where you can be somebody in one world and another person some else in the other.

But you are actually one and the same, wherever you go. You just need to ask any pilgrim of any kind, who returns to this "real" world with his stories of grand adventure and high exploration, and the answer is probably best summed up by the poet T.S. Eliot when he wrote in his Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration

and the end of our exploring.

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Life is simple. It is simple to travel and skim like a stone across the water's surface through different countries, communities and neighbourhoods.

It is easy to be an observer and comment on the state of affairs of the world around and not offer anything in the way of contribution. It is easy to sit back and offer judgement and criticism knowing that you are just passing through this "other" world back towards your "real" world.

But humans being humans, simple is often not easy. Or clean. But we make things rather complicated and messy. Where else would you get excitement from?

You can only observe for so long before the need to participate and contribute becomes overwhelming and the need to fill a part of your life becomes intense.

Especially when a fundamental of happy life is that it is better to give than to receive. Nowhere is this more evident when you communicate across the gulf of language and culture, find a common ground and share a laugh and a smile and a memory for both.

And as you slowly, often painfully with hardship and challenge, bring the "real" and "other" worlds closer together and begin to merge them into one, especially one where you are Master and Creator, then you begin to appreciate more and more what T.S. Elliot's pilgrim understood and what islanders anywhere in the world have always known. It is the islanders that often see the mainland far more clearly than the locals themselves!

Since this journey has ended and the doors of this adventure have closed, we are happy to be both islander and mainlander; enjoying the delights that only a mainland can bring, but also the rolling seas, distant horizons, arching sky and the feeling of being betwixt and between heaven and earth that only a seafaring islander can appreciate.

But the mainlander and the islander both need to know when to go to that "other" world and that is the hard part. But like we can guarantee, all you have got to do is decide to go and then the hardest part is over. So GO!

The end........of these adventures, but the beginning of many more!