I have always believed that adventure can take many forms. There is what I would term “quintessential adventure”, which is what people commonly think of when they hear the term “adventure”: traveling, adventure sports, physical risk taking, etc.) . I’ve always thought you could adventure intellectually as well… exploring the realms of philosophy and literature and history, etc. In high school, I also coined the term “mundane adventure”, which is simply finding the adventure in everyday life and seeing the beauty of the ordinary with the fresh eyes which we too often only reserve for exotic endeavors. I’m still categorizing adventure in my head, but I think mundane adventure is an aspect of “deep and true adventure”, but I’m still figuring that out. Because I’m still getting a handle on “deep and true adventure”.
As, I’ve looked through all my writing on adventure over the past 10+ years as well as thinking deeply about it in my current life as I’ve struggled to find epiphanies as to why I felt so stuck in life… and I’ve found some common threads among my ideas and concerns that I think serve as good principles of “deep and true adventure”. “Deep and true adventure” being the idea of using the spirit of adventure to help one live more deeply and meaningfully not matter where one is or what one is doing, which is how I have used “adventure” in my own life. Anyhow, as I said on the homepage, this all is kind of in the process of being made cohesive, so please bear that in mind. But without further ado, I will share these principles as I understand them in this stage of the project. There is no order to them at this stage.
- Do not let fear limit your life. Face your fears and explore them. So often, fear is the gatekeeper to what is most important to us in life.
- Be present to life and live it with gratitude. Let nothing be lost on you in all the goodness and wonder of life, even in the small and mundane things we so easily take for granted.
- Be open to life. Never just tell yourself “no” for something good you want to do that doesn’t hurt another person. See life in terms of possibility rather than impossibility. Live with a humility and courage that allows your heart and mind to be open to the gifts and opportunities and expansion of life which will come your way that you didn’t even expect.
- Practice spontaneity and have fun. Have and relish moments of wild abandon, rather than always needing to be in control. Get over yourself enough to have fun and not care what others will think of you in that.
- Live with radical self-honesty and make no excuses. Reasons are fine, excuses are lame. They are a way of hiding from our truest self and keeping it from others. That’s not what deep and true adventurers do.
- Be honest about and find what truly matters to you in life. But also make the most of everything that comes your way.
That all is how a deep and true adventurer does not waste their life in fear and lies and taking life for granted– being too afraid to live and so caught up in themselves that they miss the life in and all around them.
Living in such a way where none of life is lost on you is the point of being a deep and true adventurer.
Tips on How to Find Your Deep and True Adventure
I see deep and true adventure as a way to approach life in general, but I also look through my life to find “deep and true adventures” so I can keep learning and growing and expanding my life past boundaries of lies and fear. As the only boundaries I want to have on my life are my values and principles.
I will expand this to hopefully be more helpful in the future, but I wanted to encourage others who are so inclined to deep and true adventure with me as soon as I could. So I thought maybe sharing these suggestions could be a good start:
- Stop lying to yourself so you can be honest about what truly matters to you. Look behind your excuses for life and busyness and see what fears might lie behind them. I have rarely ever been intentionally dishonest in my life, but I was the queen of lying to myself when I was hiding from life in high school behind my severe social anxiety. Calling myself out in all my lies and developing radical self-honesty was absolutely life-changing. I highly recommend it.
- Adventure through your most meaningful fears towards what truly matters to you. Having been someone once riddled with fears, I understand what it is like to have a lot of fears. I don’t think all these fears hold equal weight. The most important fears to bring to light and explore and understand are the ones which obscure or keep us from what matters most to us in life. Those are what I consider our most meaningful fears. These are the ones I think are most important to face. A lot of time there is also a life wound involved with these fears that could use some attention and healing as well.