You Miss 100% of the Shots You Don’t Take
Or; How to Find Love in a Tropical Paradise
I’m the kind of person who likes routine.
Most people think of this as a positive character trait, but I see it as neutral.
It can go either way. I’m just as likely to fall into a bad routine as I am a good one.
For the last few months of 2019, in Goa, India, fall into a bad routine is exactly what I did. A bad routine is commonly called a ‘rut’, but referring to living in a party hostel by a tropical beach (for free) as a rut is pushing it a bit.
It was not a productive routine, lets put it that way.
Summers in Goa are the laziest days you can imagine.
After 10 am, it's too hot to do pretty much anything; apart from search out patches of shade and pray a rare breeze snakes its way around your body. The only thing rarer than a breeze was a cloud, and the only thing rarer than a cloud was to see anyone moving at a pace quicker than an idle stroll.
To call the days slow is a criminal understatement.
Nothing gets done in Goa during peak heat. You can’t plan anything.
You set a plan with good intentions, but nine times out of ten, when it comes round to it, you realise that the best option is to slink back to your preferred shady area and drink iced smoothies.
Rest assured — I had adapted to living life at a snail’s pace with ease.
By the end of my second month in Goa and I had ticked most of the boxes:
Four weeks living in a traditional yoga school? Check.
Countless hours spent soaking in the Arabian Sea? Check.
Party to trance music on the beach? Check.
Dodge poisonous jellyfish in the surf? Check.
Watched as the sun dipped it’s toes over the horizon more times than I care to remember? Check, check, check.
Christmas in Goa
The year was coming to an end.
I celebrated Christmas day sipping fruit juice on a sun lounger and eating pancakes with my new Indian friends. I cast my mind back to my last Christmas with my family back in the UK. I couldn’t have imagined in a million years this would be my life.
I made the leap in October 2019 — given up everything that I owned, filled a backpack and hit the road with nothing but a healthy chunk of savings and a desire to explore the planet and experience new ways of living.
But I’d got a bit stuck in Goa.
It was almost impossible not to slip into a routine there. A routine that was as easy going as it comes. It was nice to chill out for those long weeks in South India, to shake the emotional dust of my old life from my shoulders and take time to reflect on how to build this new version of myself.
But as the year drew to a close, the time for reflection was over. It was time to move.
Where to?
I had no idea.
I left the UK on my own without any plan of action. I just wanted to put one foot in front of the other and find out where it would take me. I wanted to put my faith in the random chance of the universe and the kindness of strangers and see where I ended up.
It’s a beautiful idea, an idea that I had tucked away in the back of my mind for years, but one that caused me a gut-wrenching pulse of anxiety when it came to the surface. There was so much unknown. So much that could potentially go wrong—such an expansive gulf of routines.
Because that’s what my life back home had come to — comfort zones and routine. Carving out a nice little rut for myself (it was definitely a rut back then) and going strictly WITH the grain.
But there was something else, something that almost broke through the knot of anxiety, something that began to blow away the fog of my inaction.
A little phrase I saw on a meme or an Instagram caption.
‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’
Fight or Flight?
I was the number one non-shot-taker. When an opportunity came my way, my decisions making process was swayed not by potential benefits but the risk of failure. When the ball is on the penalty spot, fear of losing the match was much stronger than the imagined glory of lifting the cup.
I didn’t take shots.
But that phrase kept niggling at me.
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
That phrase had booked me a ticket and got me onto a one-way flight to another continent. I had taken a shot and scored myself two sun-kissed months in Goa...
And then I had found the first comfortable place before whipping out my trusty ol’ rut whittling knife.
I was in desperate need of a catalyst, something to spark me into action.
And a few days before new years eve, one arrived in the form of a curly-haired South African girl named Fa-eeza.
The night she arrived in my life will remain imprinted into my memory forever.
A music festival — one of the largest in Asia — had arrived in town and with it a whole army of party-goers. The hostel I was staying at was buzzing with people gearing up to spend the next few days dancing and partying deep into the night.
She came and sat next to me under the palm trees, and being the only two non-Indians there that night, we instantly hit it off.
We talked for hours. The connection between us was undeniable. Despite the ruckus of a gang of hyped-up Indians happening around us, the whole world fell into silence apart from the words that fell from her lips. There was nothing else in that moment besides her and me and the meandering conversation between us.
I don’t know what it was about her, but she saw straight through all my bullshit and the persona I had built up around myself to protect me from the world. She made a beeline directly for the most intimate and hidden parts of myself, and when she got there, she cracked them open with effortless grace.
In those hours I revealed more to Fa-eeza, a girl I had just met, than I had told most of my closest friends back home. Everything about me was laid bare, exposed.
The night ended, and we went to our separate rooms, and I laid there feeling totally naked. I had said too much. I felt completely vulnerable.
But for some reason, it just felt right. There was instant trust.
Over the next few days, we were inseparable. We chilled on the beaches, and in the seas and markets of Goa. The conversation carried on effortlessly — there was no small talk; we spoke about spirituality, politics, society, childhood, relationships, and parents.
It didn’t take me long to realise that I wanted to leave Goa with her. I wanted to grab her by the hand and take her with me on my journey into the unknown.
Take the Damn Shot
But this involved taking a shot. And a high-risk shot at that, which if missed, was sure to bury me deeper into my sleepy Goan routine of drugs and alcohol, partying at night and sleeping all day.
One night, as we took a long moonlight stroll along the beach back to our hostel, I could feel how close she was to me as she uttered words I will never forget:
“I don’t want to have any regrets in my life. I don’t want to hold back. I want to hold hands with people I want to hold hands with, kiss the people I want to kiss.”
This was it. The ball was on the penalty spot, the crowd hushed in eager anticipation. Wait, what’s he doing? The captain of the team is running back towards the dressing room! He’s completely bottled it!
In my defence….what am I talking about? I have no defence. Even with the clearest of signals, the fear of rejection had me completely frozen.
That night, amid the humid Goan heat, I lay looking at the slats of the bunk above me, mumbling under my breath, cursing myself for not taking the opportunity she had presented to me.
You know what I did the next day? I plucked up every ounce of courage I had and royally doubled down on my inability to take a risk.
One of the guys at the hostel had managed to find Fa-eeza a cheap weekend ticket to the music festival due to kick off that night — Sunburn 2020. She told me that he could get me the same deal, but for some strange, unfathomable reason, I declined.
Even as the pitiful generic excuses came from my mouth, I could hear a voice in the back of my head scream, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!!
So that night, they left. A gang twenty-strong, looking like they were ready to have the time of their lives. The energy was high, and the noise as their taxis arrived was even higher, leaving a piercing silence in their wake as they rolled off into the night.
Sometimes failure can be the best fuel
Something changed in me that night.
As I lay festering in my rut, my mind making a thorough inventory of every mistake I had ever made in my life, I knew I had to change. I could not go through the rest of my life not taking any risks, living firmly within the boundaries of my comfort zone. I had left the UK to ditch the old habit of going through the motions and painting the strokes of my life by pre-determined numbers. Still the old habits had caught up with me.
It doesn’t matter how far you run away from your problems; they will always catch up with you. You can be on a beach in the tropics or a dingy rented room in rainy Cambridge, UK, but unless you turn up and tackle your demons head-on, they are never going to go away.
Sunburn Festival (remember those?)
It’s funny how things work out.
Most of the time, you have to go out and seize opportunities. Sometimes (very rarely) luck, fate, chance, God, the universe — whatever you want to call it — drops the opportunity right in your lap.
The next morning, the hostel was alive with talk of last nights festivities. Fa-eeza was there, surrounded by people who actually knew how to let go and have fun, people more interesting than boring old Colby, discussing plans for day two of Sunburn 2020.
The manager of the hostel approached me when I was eating breakfast.
It turned out that not all of the festival-goers were there to party. The hostel was also playing host to a small group of lighting technicians, who having done their job of setting up the visuals for a promotional stand, were due to head back home. They had all-weekend VIP passes and no interest in hanging around a bunch of drunk millennials listening to electronic music blasting at maximum volume.
All I had to do was look Indian (I had that covered already — I had lost count of the amount of Indians who started conversations with me in Hindi) and pretend my name was Sachin Dmello.
Fast forward five hours, and the rest of the gang are queuing up at the main gates of the festival site. Meanwhile, a steward has spotted my ‘staff’ entry pass and ushered me into the fast-track VIP queue.
Every sinew in my body was telling me to bolt. They’re never going to let me in. They’re going to realise I’m faking it and throw me into an Indian jail cell for identity fraud…
Luckily for me, India — and particularly Goa, is one of the most laid back places in the world, and this blog post doesn’t end like a chapter from Shantaram. The guy on the door didn’t even look at my face — he saw the pass around my neck and let me in instantly.
‘Velcome to Sunburn, sir!’
The rest, as they say, is history.
Three days later, in the early hours of New Year's day, Fa-eeza and I walked out from the hotel hosting an NYE party and sat ourselves down in a beachside shack, with a group of singers and DJs who ran the reggae sound-system we had danced to all night.
The back alley ecstasy we had taken was wearing off into a nice warm buzz, and the sun was starting to rise behind us.
“I’m going to leave Goa earlier than I planned,” Fa-eeza said to me, our hands locked together. “I want to spend some time in a luxury hotel, with a private toilet and a bathtub. I think I will leave in two days.”
Maybe it was the drugs; perhaps I was embiggened (a noble spirit embiggens us all) by my recent successful shot-taking. Probably both.
I turned to her and said, “I’m coming with you.”
She just nodded and smiled.
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P.S.
Take your shots, people.
One more time — TAKE YOUR SHOTS!
The world can be a scary place. People like to dwell on the negative, the things that can and will go wrong. I think it’s hard-wired somewhere deep in our primal brains. As a survival tactic, it’s more important to remember which part of the jungle the Tigers lived in than where the mango trees are growing. Trauma becomes hardwired so easily.
A common response when I told people I was going to India was, ‘Careful you don’t get mugged! Beware of the rabid street dogs! Monkeys can steal your wallet! Don’t catch hepatitis! MALARIA!’ (More fool them, Covid trumped all of these.)
But you know what’s scarier? I’ll let Ken Watanabe from Inception do the talking here:
“Do you want to take a leap of faith? Or become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?” — Saito
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P.P.S
Okay, I’m no statistician, but I have noticed a glaring flaw in my theory.
If you take zero shots, you actually have a 0% miss rate. Taking more shots is a sure-fire way to increase your miss rate. But who needs logic and reality when you’re buzzing off your tits at 3 am on a beach in India…