Adventure

Recently I visited Asheville, North Carolina for a wedding and wandered into Malaprop’s bookstore. There, on a set of shelves, I encountered a small challenge that sparked huge realizations for me.

I found a shelf of anonymous books wrapped in brown paper with several words describing what lay inside. Some books had words like “Fantasy”, “Historical”, “Family”, and “Opinion”. And some had words like “Delicious”, “Searing”, “Stifling”, “Raunchy”, “Luminous”, and “Commanding”. No hints about what lay beneath the paper.

My first impulse was to reach out for them. If I couldn’t rip them open, I could drink in the vivid descriptions and lay the books in my hands to measure size and heft. But I stopped myself. Which book was the right book? Maybe I should reach out for a wrong book?  What if I didn’t like it? What if I’d read it already? What if, when I got it to the register, it was a first edition that would cost $120?

Immediately, Emily Andersson came to mind. My friend Emmi is currently in Vietnam in the middle of a 15 month journey that has taken her to Eastern Europe, Thailand, and other countries I can’t remember. She is 20 years old and traveling on her own. A couple of weeks ago she posted on Facebook that she had bought a motorcycle….

…….. which she didn’t know how to ride, had packed her few clothes and belongings onto the back, and was headed out of Hanoi to spend the next several months and 5,000km down the Ho Chi Minh trail on her way to Cambodia and Laos. As she launched herself out of her comfort zone, she admitted being terrified but “addicted to the feelings of challenge, uncertainty, and ever-changing horizons”. “I’m not ready” she wrote. “But I’m as ready as I’ll ever be”.

And I, standing before a shelf in an air-conditioned store, could not choose an unknown book.

It was sobering because I realized I’d lost some of that sense of adventure I’d had in my past. Not the Emily Andersson sense of adventure. Few people have that. But my own personal sense of adventure in trying new things and taking risks and just moving forward.

The good news is that we are presented with adventure all the time and may not even notice it. We don’t have to be Emmi, but we do need to stretch. After my second hip replacement, my brother told me on the phone, “I don’t think I could have gone through a second one knowing what the first one took”.  My brother, who loves nothing more than being dropped in a mountainous area to streak on a bicycle down narrow paths between trees. So, one of my adventures is two hip replacements that have greatly enhanced my life and one of his is defying gravity while trying not to crash. 

Some people pull up roots to move their young family and three animals across the country. Some people write a book and keep trying to sell it until someone publishes it. Or keep trying out for the basketball team even though they haven’t been chosen for the three previous years. Others, like Cheryl Strayed, hike 1,200 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail. Some people adopt their orphaned nephew. Some try using pastels to paint rather than oils. Others help their community recover from devastating floods or storms. Some risk their lives leading social justice movements. Some dangle precariously from bridges to block tankers destined to exploit oil deposits in the Arctic Ocean. 

Some people accept an offer to dance at a wedding.

Adventure is necessary in life and it is also personal. It is what stretches us and if it doesn’t terrify us, it at least takes us out of our comfort zone. None of us will be ready, but we’ll be as ready as we’ll ever be.

P.S. I bought a book.

Try It:

• Do you need more adventure in your life? What terrifies you? In what ways and for what reasons? What might you avoid that could enhance your life? What might happen if you embraced it?
• What does “adventure” mean to you? How have you experienced it? How did it feel? What did you learn about yourself or the world?
• What “adventures” occur right in front of you in a typical week? How do you respond to them? How does that feel?
• How might you design a little more healthy, positive adventure into your life by stepping outside your comfort zone? It could be travel, learning a new skill, exploring new places where you live, trying new foods, starting conversations with new people. Keep track of your adventures, how you feel when you have them, what you get out of them, what you learn about yourself. And notice if stepping out of your comfort zone gets easier as you go.