Some adventures are big and some small, some are intellectual, some are physical, all can teach us something and enrich our lives
“I think therefore I am” is perhaps the most widely used philosophical quote out there. This Descartes quote, whilst rooted in what it it means to exist, is based on our own experiences being limited to our own senses. It is this philosophy on which I define what an adventure is. We associate the thrill of diving with sharks, or tetering along a narrow mountain ridge, tackling big seas or hitting a big kicker with the physical, but all experience is of the senses, and therefore mental.
Equally an adventure can be intellectual and most of my projects are rooted in that. I like to do things myself to learn the skill, to understand the possible and to experience the process. I can pay a mechanic to fix my car, or I can take a journey of knowledge. Sometimes the result would have been cheaper, or almost certainly faster taking the “pay someone to do it” approach, but I would have learnt nothing.
Of course, time is valuable so we all have to understand our limits and not get carried away. Some specialist skills last a lifetime and pay back many times over, household DIY or core car maintenance, some are not worth the equipment outlay or are infrequent enough not to bother in my case (changing car tyres or gas plumbing, failure is not really an option here)..
the value of failure
Nobody wants to fail, but not doing something for the fear of failure is a huge blocker to personal growth. Great business and people managers understand this, and it is a core tenet unpinning the operational culture of our biggest tech giants from Google to Amazon.
There is only one real failure and that is “failure to try”.
Bringing the physical and mental together
It’s perhaps this conjoining of physical and mental adventure that amplify the rewards in my mind. A few examples:
- Climbing a mountain independently versus being guided. The physical challenge may be higher, the same or even lesser, but the mental leap into the unknown and application of skill in creating something ourselves elevates the unguided approach to a next level acheivement.
- Bike packing using homemade luggage. The satisfaction of having created something new, something I could have bought, but that does a great job always makes me smile. I could equally apply this to tying flies or building my own sauna from scratch. The greatest joy is in the activity but this is heightened by having crafted the means to enjoy it.
So what is an adventure? I would define it as anything that takes our sense somewhere new, whether experiencing a new place or physical sensation, learning a skill or applying knowledge with tangible outcome, or even purely intellectual in challenging our own viewpoints and discovering a new way to think about something.
