A Christmas Inspiration

By Mark Young

President, Rational Games, Inc.,

JANUARY 2025

Warm holiday greetings from Berlin as Christmas is imminent.  

It is always a good occasion to check in with valued friends to celebrate the end of the year 

and take time for new ideas and reflections.

In that vein, I would like to introduce you to a fairly inspiring story that I encountered recently.  The Out of Eden project is the creation of Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist who in 2013 set out to walk the entire route of our primeval ancestors, from the Rift Valley in Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego in Chile.

Eleven years later, as of Christmas 2024, he is currently in Seoul, with very sore feet and worn-out shoes,  many stories to tell and already quite an inspiration to millions of online followers.

This project resonates with me for several reasons:

1.  Its audacity.  After nine years' walking (!) Paul is roughly halfway to his goal.  To my knowledge, no single person has ever embarked on such an ambitious journey and his success (at least so far) is a testament to human endurance and perseverance.  I am in awe.

2.  Its simplicity.  This is a project from the school of "Slow Journalism".  Although National Geographic and others have contributed fairly sophisticated online tracking and update mechanisms ("(Where is Paul?”,) this is not on Instagram and there are no influencers seeking commercial benefits.  The Walk is as analog as it gets.  Where ever possible,  Paul completed his journey solely on foot, using pure negotiation ingenuity to deal with dangers from sharpshooters in the West Bank, Kurdish gunmen in Syria and threatened deportation in Pakistan.  Not to mention falling in love in Georgia and a COVID lockdown in Myanmar.  This is resilience indeed.

3.  Its humility.  Paul carries very little money and no other baggage.  Much in the tradition of Zen Buddhist mendicants, he is totally dependent on the charity of the people he meets along the way.  He encounters humanity up close, totally eschewing the usual distance of journalists to stories. And he has found many companions along the way, to walk part of the path with him.  The walk is a sequence of true connections.

4.  Its relevance.  This project shines a bright light on what is in my view one of the principal issues of our time:  migration.  But rather than analyzing and discussing it, Paul is doing it and feeling it in the body. He makes us all aware that, as Hannah Arendt once said, “we are all refugees now”.

Please look at the links below if you want to know more.  There is also a crowdfunding site if you want to make a Christmas gift, but that is totally optional.

• https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2024/12/19/a-journalist-retraces-humanitys-journey-out-of-africa-on-foot

• https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/media/2013-02-out-of-eden-walk-trailer/

• https://digital-geography.com/maps-eden-walk-paul-salopek-national-geographic/

In this spirit, I wish you good End of Year celebrations.

And let’s all wish Paul Godspeed.

In awe.

Mark Young