Sometimes adventure looks like guys in their 40s meeting early on a Saturday morning, last minute, to skateboard the newest pavement in town.
Sometimes adventure looks like following a strange urge to drive on a Sunday afternoon to take a picture of a Celtic cross at a church up the road.
Sometimes adventure looks like picking a place you’ve never been and making a weekend road trip of it, just for the experience of it, and to make what Brene Brown calls “picture memories.”
Sometimes adventure sounds like saying “Here I am,” in following a path that you don’t know where it will lead, but you know it is laid out for you to walk.
Sometimes adventure sounds like taking a chance, starting something new, whether in business, art, career, love, fitness–something you aren’t sure will work, but you know you have to find out.
Sometimes adventure feels like showing up at the blank canvas, or for the morning run, or at the gym, or in front of the blank page, or the studio, even and especially on days where you don’t feel like it, on the way to something bigger, and finding a reward that you wouldn’t have found if you hit snooze, or came up with an excuse not to do it.
Sometimes adventure feels like letting go.
Sometimes adventure looks like helping a friend move.
Sometimes adventure sounds like sharing stories and connecting with someone.
Sometimes adventure looks like stretching out an afternoon, just to have a little more time together, to see the sun on the river.
Sometimes adventure sounds like daydreaming with someone and then trying to make daydreams things that actually happen.
Most of the time, adventure is a state of mind. It’s being open to possibilities. It’s being fully present in the moment, right now. It’s being surprised by something simple, something everyday, something that could be brushed off as ordinary.
There is adventure in the everyday, which is where we spend most of our lives. There is adventure in the epic, the unknown, the new. There is adventure in making the everyday new. I never get tired of T.S. Eliot writing:
“We shall not cease from exploration
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Sometimes adventure looks like planting a garden.
Sometimes adventure sounds like putting a dog and two teenagers in a car and picking somewhere to walk outside on a nice day and hearing what life looks like to them.
Sometimes adventure looks like parking in a different place at a state park on a beautiful morning and taking all the log crossings you can find along the way.
Sometimes adventure sounds like getting excited for opening day–of baseball season, of rockfish season, of whatever it is that is coming that puts a smile on your face.
Sometimes adventure looks like trying out for something, or trying something you’ve never done before, at whatever age you are now.
Sometimes adventure looks like spending a sunny Sunday spring cleaning the yard.
Sometimes adventure smells like a backyard fire pit on a clear night.
Sometimes adventure feels like seeing buds on a magnolia tree that you know is soon going to burst into 10 days of breathtaking blossom.
Sometimes adventure sounds like laughter that rolls through everyone in the room.
Sometimes adventure feels like spending time with the right people.
Maybe adventure looks like today.