Inspiration... It's where you find it.

*SPOILER* This blog is not going to be funny.

Inspiration is one of the most bizarre ideas thinkable. That your whole being can be fired into action by a single line, a phrase, and image, a moment, a feeling, an action, it's ludicrous.

But it happens.

Inspiration is a vitally important thing. Without it, we become trapped in listless inaction. Why? Because like it or not human beings still subscribe to a herd mentality. We need someone or something to push us.

For me, that something is a book. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on inspirational books. I quite like these, they help promote some interesting ideas. Books like "The Art of the Start" and such are particularly good, as is just about anything by John Maxwell.

The book i find most inspiring is not one of these.

It's not a self help book, or a book about personal triumph, great successes, a biography of a long dead great leader or even a big book of quotes you can flick through from time to time.

It's "On the Road", by Jack Kerouac.

Jack Kerouac, for those who aren't familiar with the name, is one of the founding figures of a literary sensibility and cultural movement known as "Beat". Beat, as it came to be, was a reaction to the ideas and emotion arising from the end of the second world war. People had touched death, become close to it, felt every ache and motion of it, and so lived lives at a fantastic speed, determined to either outpace it or die trying. It was a time of great experimentation, contrary to what many think the great drugs revolution didn't begin in the sixties, it started much earlier than that with the Beat generation. Jazz music became the dominant cultural force, and amidst the great whirling uncertainty of the age, the threats of communism and nuclear annihilation, disease, racial tension, homosexuality and the explosion in drug use...

One man jumped on a train with no ticket and traveled across America.

That one man was Jack Kerouac. It was only two years after the end of the second world war, and he was a young man in the face of the enormous truth of the world. Rather than plug in and join the world, he chose to make his own path, to find himself in the whirl and bustle of the unseen places in his life. He took his friends, fell in and out of love, got jobs, got fired, did drugs, had sex, listened to jazz and wrote it all down. Aside from the names, everything in the book is, to the best of everyone's knowledge, true and unabridged.

It's hard to say exactly why this book inspired me to the degree it did. My mum and dad bought me a copy for Christmas one year in my mid teens, and i devoured it. Four times. One after the other. I've never read a book through more than once in a row, but I've read "On the Road" more times now than i care to mention. I'd like to say for the record that i think my parents were absolutely right in giving me a book about rebelling right in the most rebellious time of my life. Rather than fuel the uncertain and often violently angry feelings that every young man experiences at that time of life, it instead calmed them, reassuring me that there were other people out there who had felt like i did, long before i was even born. It showed me just what was possible when rather than bottle everything up and lash out at people, i learned to control myself and channel my energies correctly. More than anything, and as cliched as it has become, I'm proud to say that "On the Road" made me want to travel. Not on a package holiday, not on a jumbo jet to some sandy beach full of sun burnt fleshy idiots. It made me want to get under the skin of places, feel out the people, get to know things, see things on my own time and context. Ever been to Vegas? I bet you have. Ever driven for two days across a desert under the heat of the unbelievable sun surrounded by scary primeval tusks of Joshua trees, only to emerge bathed in the glare of a neon metropolis rising inexorably from the sands to greet you? Have you been across desert, coast, forest, ocean, island and mountain range? In two weeks? How about driving from the grand canyon to San Diego? Five hundred and twenty six miles. In a single day. 

If you have, you don't soon forget it.

I know i won't. "On the Road" inspired me to see more of the world than i could see from my bedroom window, find out what was over the next horizon, reach out and welcome new people, try new things and be free in myself. It fired me to travel, to leave England, and throw myself into the paths of people from across the world. I went to Canada, and i've never looked back.

More than anything else, the one thing i will cherish that "On the Road" taught me was that whatever i am and wherever i end up, the pursuit of freedom is above all things. Regardless of whether you find that freedom like i did traveling across western America, or canoeing lazily down some mangrove hung river, biking and hiking through the Rockies, flying through the stratosphere or just having a lie in on a Saturday morning, find your inspiration, find your freedom, and cherish it always.