In my last year at school, the final year camp was located at a place called Wilpena Pound.
It is a natural amphitheatre of mountains located 429 kilometres north of Adelaide, South Australia.
The Pound is a very popular area for bush-walking, and therefore a good place to have a school camp.
The Pound traverses some of the most beautiful country in the Flinders Ranges.
The peaks are very rugged, and thick scrub and timber inside the Pound can make navigation difficult.
In 1959, a 12-year-old boy became lost while walking inside the Pound, and despite search efforts, his skeletal remains were not located until 18 months later.
A pass on the upper slopes of St Mary Peak is named after him.
His brother John Bannon, later became the Premier of South Australia.
Just outside the Pound is a motel and camping ground.

At the beginning of the school camp.
We were dropped off by bus and set up our tents for an overnight stay, before setting off in the morning to walk across the Pound, there were about 100 students.

My friend’s parents happened to be staying in the motel and they invited both of us to dinner in the restaurant.
We didn’t tell the teachers, but someone did.
As we were in the middle of our meal… in came the teacher in charge of the camp.
He rudely pulled me out of the restaurant and I was sent back to my tent.
He didn’t want me in the restaurant while the other students were eating basic food at the camp grounds.
My friend could stay in the restaurant because he was with his parents.
This teacher always gave me a hard time.
The next morning the students were separated into groups of six and a leader was put in charge of each group.
We were sent off at different intervals to cross the Pound and then everyone was going to come together at the end of the walk to camp on the other side of the surrounding hills.
There were not any facilities for camping where we were going and also we would be out of contact with the motel and everyone else because the two-way radios would not work as the terrain blocked the signal.
It was about a six-hour hike.

The group I was leading got to our destination in the afternoon, but no-one was there, we had not seen any other students for hours.
Then we understood why we had not seen any other students on our hike.
We were lost!!
The Pound was a dangerous place to get lost in, the weather was hot and we did not have much water.
We climbed to the highest peak and tried to get our bearings, but all we could see were the hills in the distance that marked where we began our journey in the morning.
We knew how to get back to safety so we almost ran for the next few hours and arrived at the motel and camping ground at around 7.00 pm.
A summer storm was brewing and it was getting dark by the time we tiredly walked into the motel and told the staff what had happened to us.
My friend’s parents were still there and they organised for us to stay at the motel, they also made sure we were fed… as we were very hungry.
Now the tables were turned, the night before I had been ingloriously dragged out of the restaurant and one night later, I am sitting in the same restaurant having a lovely meal, surrounded by well-wishers.
Meanwhile the teacher that gave me a hard time was now having his own hard time.
He did not know we were safe.
He spent the night looking for us in the rain.
Boy, did it feel good sleeping in the motel and waking up to a cooked breakfast.

The big problem was.
The teacher and the students who spent the whole night looking for us, never believed our story about getting lost.
They always believed we went back to the motel on purpose.
But the truth is…we really were lost.
Isn’t it tough when you tell the truth and no-one believes you.

Tony Egar.

Every time you jump, you experience gravity.
It pulls you back down to the ground.
Without gravity, you’d float off into the atmosphere.
We see gravity at work in our lives every day.
We see the evidence, but the mystery is still there.
Even with several well-received theories attempting to explain why a book falls to the ground…they’re still just theories.
The mystery of gravity is still unexplained.

In my last year of high school, my favourite class was physics.
We were learning how and why everything works.
Until we got to gravity!
I was shocked to discover that my very clever physics teacher did not know the answer.
Gravity is so simple;
I thought the scientists would have found out by now why gravity does what it does.
We see it, we believe it, and yet we don’t understand it.
How can that be?
Is it part spiritual, part material?

Gravity works in our emotional life.
We stir ourselves up on the inside to get motivated,
then along comes gravity in the form of negativity.
Negative thoughts or experiences do their work and bring us down.
Here is another mystery, if you leave your garden unattended why do weeds take over?
Why doesn’t the garden prosper by itself?
Why does it need constant attention?
None of these questions would need to be answered if we didn’t suffer from an ailment called curiosity.
Curious people can find themselves being frustrated by a lack of answers.
If you are not curious, then you don’t care.
But you do care, don’t you?
When we care, it means we are interested.
And interested people are motivated people.

When life tries to drag you down, your curiosity causes you to lift your eyes and open your mind to ask the question in a fresh way.
Sometimes a question which has no satisfactory answer can lead you to ponder a new question that you have never thought of before.
In other words, you can just go around the unanswered question which is blocking your way.

As you get older a lot of mysteries are already solved, such as:
What is it like to fall in love?
How does it feel to have children?
What career will I have?
Will they find the Titanic?

As old mysteries are solved, new ones surface, such as:
What is it like to fall out of love?

Now I have got your attention!
People fall out of love when they get bored, and that happens because they lose interest, and that happens because they aren’t curious about their loved one any more.

Last night my wife and I were home alone having dinner, it was the 26^th of January which was a public holiday called “Australia Day”.
Our dinner was going along pleasantly enough until we spontaneously told each other a story from our childhood that we had never shared before in over 30 years of marriage.
The stories were not ground shaking, but they were interesting.
We discovered a tiny bit of something new about each other and I could sense both of us falling in love all over again.

Love is the biggest mystery of all.

Here is my theory on how to stay in love. It’s just a theory.
See your loved one as a mystery… and then see yourself as the only person in the universe with the keys to unlock them in the fullest way possible.
Now you are on an adventure where the discoveries are endless.
Life is exciting again.
You are a person on a mission.

Curiosity is an elixir of youth. Re-discover it!

Just remember… be curious about your wife, not your friend’s wife.

Tony Egar.