About Daniel Muggeridge

Growing up in North East “Tassie” (Tasmania), I had a beautiful, happy, uneventful childhood. For reasons I still don’t quite fathom I then framed my teen and adult years far more around duty than joy or fun. I feel like I’ve poured myself out for family and strived to keep five wonderful people (and me!) fed, clothed and housed. Other than an incredible circle of deeply precious friends and some contributions to Church and to Community Organisations, that pretty much sums up my trips around the sun so far.

Much of my career has been in consulting, solving business problems often with IT-flavoured solutions. Over the last decade that’s been through a Community Sector consultancy I co-founded with one of the country’s best (IMO!) IT architects.

Talk about ups and downs and riding by the seat of our pants through that journey. Somehow a bunch of the brightest minds I’ve met coalesced in that powerful team, which eventually gave birth to a second company, Oho, focused on keeping vulnerable people safe. Neither my shares in the (still successful) consulting business nor my only income (derived from it) survived my marriage failure. I don’t have an ongoing place in the exec team for our second business either; so find myself with a chapter closed, and (doing all I can to put it in the positive) a blank canvas for what comes next.

I tend to charge like a bull at a gate at whatever I set my mind to. And usually set my mind to pretty-much the first thing that crosses it. I’m a slow learner, but more recently I’ve been discovering that perhaps bull-at-the-first-gate-I-see isn’t reliably the best approach to life. I’ve therefore set myself the (uncomfortable) project of not jumping too quickly into new things after falling out the other end of family and business life.

All those threads pull together towards taking a Sabbatical, a career break, to reassess, to rediscover my centre of balance, to work out how to do life well beyond this unwanted exclamation mark in my story.

Through these dark years it’s been my faith in and friendship with Jesus that has kept me from drowning. It still feels impossibly tough, but there’s hope (it probably deserves a capital H Hope) in the Maker of Heaven and Earth knowing my name and holding me in the palm of His hand through whatever life throws my way. So I’m dedicating this trip to a pursuit of hope, both in my own life and as a conversation with those along the way.

I’ve been on and off motorbikes through much of my adult life, and (when I manage to keep them upright) love the poetry of a good bike on a winding country road. I’ve also had latent desire to spend time bush walking and camping – but done almost none since school years until I nearly died twice last November on a solo week long hike through the back of Mansfield (Victoria, Australia). So I’m combining two loves in the attempt to bike and camp my way to the opposite side of the globe. And I figure I’ve already got a demonstrated talent for staying alive on bikes and in tents despite the odds, so we’re looking good for a 25,000km trek through some fairly hairy places.

I have been told I have a fairly generous tolerance for risk, but have no real knowledge or experience for this nutty adventure. Since I started talking about it I’ve found an amazing depth of others’ experience with relevant components of the setup, and so many have been generous with their time, stories, advice and connections. That generosity will be a key part of keeping me alive over these next months.

The plan at this stage is I’ll keep a diary to help me process my unfolding metaphorical journey, and take a few videos to celebrate the literal journey.

You’re welcome to follow along.

Maybe even say a prayer for me.

Dan Muggeridge