#howtobeanexplorer

How to be an explorer of the world by Keri Smith

A toolkit to keep alive our ability to be surprised every second and to build up our creative soul with the most ordinary activities, rebirthing a child’s spirit full of exploration, experimentation, and improvisation.

With an exact number set at 59, Keri Smith shares his pointers for self rediscovery and understanding of the world with novel ways and deep relations to everyday stimuli: objects, sensations, situations, and people. This book will show you how to make the art of collecting small, free, and experiential treasures possible, by observing it all around you as if you had never seen it before and by saving it as an experiential “metaphorical backpack”.

According to Smith, collecting is a habit for those who find the extraordinary within the ordinary by learning, as an ethnographer would, the following how-tos:

1. Notice what surrounds you

2. Consider everything as an alive being

3. Recognize the value of every single thing

4. Alter normal routes

5. Observe for long periods of time

6. Notice the stories that go on around you

7. Make connections

8. Document your discoveries

9. Lose the tendency for setting everything at once

10. Observe movement

11. Attract a dialogue

12. Find the origin of things

13. Use all of your senses.

Some of these hints to start your quest on daring to explore what seems normally obvious and ordinary.

Want to go deep into the tools, guides, and inspirational bits of advice to create your portable museum of experiences?

Upcoming blog posts from my National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions Grosvenor Fellowship in Iceland will be based on ideas for becoming an explorer.  I will be using the book How to Be an Explorer of the World. My students live within the inner-city and have so few experiences outside the city limits.  This insularity restricts their ability to appreciate, understand, and connect with the world.  Thus my travels are my way of bringing the world into the classroom.  But I also want them to explore the world in which they now live with new eyes. While in Iceland, I will attempt the same assignments I will propose to my students.  Then we will explore our own geographies with similar assignments.  

A follow-up book that I will include in my course this year is