The Art of Exploration

It’s a beautiful life, explore it!

During my recent trip to the Gobi Desert with G.H. MUMM Champagne, I did not only explore and discover the grounds of Mongolia and the diversity of our nature, I actually got to learn, particularly through the presence of extraordinary explorer Mike Horn, the art of exploration. Below is a series of reasons why I’ve decided to make my own life, an exploration, and why I believe you could benefit from making yours the same.

–Olivier.

1. An exploration is not just an adventure, it has a meaning, it has a reason to be.

As Mike Horn warned me straight away in our tent in the Gobi Desert, he does not consider himself an adventurer, and I now understand why. An adventure is when you experiment something, but it is usually superficial. Only exploration truly depicts the spirit of being in nature and of living within its essence. You cannot really share an exploration, you can only live it for yourself. One can only lead others towards it. An exploration, simply, is a travel with the purpose of discovery.

2. An exploration is not merely a trip from A to B, it is finding yourself along the way.

I’ve always declared that I only traveled for a reason, and in Mongolia, I understood the deeper meaning of my intuition. What I thought to be a personal preference was in fact my own spirit of exploration. When we travel somewhere, we do not just visit it, but we revisit ourselves through it. When faced with the immensity of nature, and the grandiose spectacle of infinite sand dunes around you, you might see it as a purely geographical visit, but really there is a spiritual dimension that grows into you. This is our very own sensibility to nature, something that we can only learn to grow inside of ourselves on a personal level.

3. Exploring the beauty of nature is the ultimate experience of life.

MUMM Champagne’s goal is to explore and celebrate the beauty of nature. This may seem specific to some, but to me this is everything. We as humans are always on the quest for nature. When we create, we recreate the beauty of nature, it is a form of translation of nature’s beauty into a language spoken by all humanity. So all art, and human work, is first sourced from the rawness and authenticity of nature. Consequently there is no greater understanding of the world than the appreciation of the beauty of nature, as it is its very essence, and it is the core of our own mastery of greatness.

4. There are three dimensions in our world: tradition, modernity and nature.

Seeing a city as diverse and atypical as Alum Bataar makes you rethink your conceptions of civilisation: the city greets you in the midst of the desert, and it is striking to see the barely defined borders between the strict desertic landscape and the first houses of the first borough of the Mongolia capital. The airport itself is certainly not the typical national airport, and the whole town greets you with its unique culture (a mix of Turkey, Russia and China), fantastic people and mystery of senses. But what is striking is the elements. Three elements combine each other almost equally through their respective powers: traditions such as the longlived production of cashmere and of course the Buddhist culture, modernity in the brand new towers and luxury shops, and nature, which surrounds and haunts the city with its positive and universal aura.

5. Exploration is the courage to find our Personal Calling, in everything we do.

What is the goal of finding yourself, if not to find your own goal in this world. The day we are named, by the people who brought us, the day we are born, we are given a role, the role starts with being a good child, a good student of work and life, a good learner of life’s ethics. But as we grow, the goal refines itself, and it is molded by a balance between our desires and our fears. Exploring is going beyond those fears, it is rediscovering our own desires, to make them not only ours, but the world’s discovery of us, to make it eventually our life’s work. When you travel the world of the mind, you learn to go places no one has ever been before.