No matter how it is spelled it might be misunderstood. As I sit
here in the corner of my local Starbucks writing there is little of true
adventure observable. There is a gal killing a bee with her homework, smashing it vehemently on the window.
Adventure 1. An undertaking involving danger and unknown risk, 2.
An exciting or remarkable experience, 3. An enterprise involving financial
risk.
Merriam Webster usually gets it right. This isn't a coffee shop
encounter mostly. It's tame here. Shackleton would not be challenged here. There are only conversations and coffee tools banging, cheerful greetings and a man telling his friend why his wife doesn't
understand him loud enough for everyone to hear; and dead bees. No adventure, not according to
Merriam Webster.
Real adventure seems to thrive on surprise and shock or sudden
peril and loss of security. It vaults us into doing what we believe we
could never do and find ourselves falling headlong into it and doing it! Liking it with wonder...thankfully.
A good friend of mine has a tagline something like this, "those
who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are doing it!" If
I am doing the previously thought of as impossible thing let me finish before you
tell me it can't be done! Fair enough?
Adventure lives in dreams too doesn't it? It is like an elusive prima ballerina that dances in your subconscious and teases your spirit. She is there
and waiting to dance with you. "You can dance can't you?" She smiles.
Well I think I can! Adventure calls and won't be satisfied until you dance with her too. We dance with boredom to much?
Risky, uncertain, costly, thrilling, robust, rewarding and necessary...for living...and essential to say we are really alive.
Remember the old movie (1998) called Simon Birch. Young
Simon was smaller than other 12 year olds and the subject of sympathy and
ridicule in life. He had a razor wit and simple candor that confronted the religious and endeared the pure
in heart.
All of Simons life he understood that he had a purpose bigger
than his current sad sorriness. As a marginalized and misunderstood young man no adventures were anticipated for Simon...until, one day on a field trip his bus slipped from an icy country road into the numbing blue waters of the French River in Ontario. Simon becomes the unlikely hero who is pressed into service and saves the life of another in his epic adventure of sacrificial rescue.
Adventure can find us or we can look for it or we can hope it never happens. You may be in the beginning of an adventure right now. The door is open and the wilderness of uncertainty beckons with a cloaked future filed with promise and peril, purpose and pleasure. You don't know and I don't know how it will all turn out. To borrow the phrase from Gene Edwards, "only God knows and he isn't telling..."
To turn away from adventure means never knowing...really knowing what could have been. That could be worse than any risk adventure might present, perhaps worse than death itself.
What would life be with out the thrill of an adventure into the unknown? What awaits the hearty soul of woman or man who will step out and brave the unknown to discover, behold and revel in what few or none have experienced before.
Is there is an adventure in your soul? Is there a bigger destiny than you could ever imagine growing closer to you? What will it take for that adventure to begin? Are you ready to dance with the uncertain? Some questions can only be answered by action...isn't this the nature of true adventure?
