Choose adventure
- Written by Eric North aka “The Happiness Warrior”
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain
Adventure is described as “engaging in an unusual and exciting, sometimes hazardous, experience, or activity”. I don’t believe that adventure has to be particularly dangerous every time, but the best adventures come when we do things that shake us out of our comfort zone and force us to rely only on our skills and abilities. As the saying goes, “do something that scares you” and connect with how alive it makes you feel afterwards. By learning to respect fear and understand it, we can become stronger and more able to adapt. It can help us enrich our lives and make us feel more grateful about everything that makes us who we are. When we leave our comfort zone, incredible things can happen to help make our lives not just more exciting, but more fulfilling and happier. Playing it safe keeps us from living to our full potential and makes it more difficult to navigate crisis and unforeseen events. When we hide in our comfort zone, we miss out on the best things in life and have a harder time embracing change without feeling lost and helpless. Developing a sense of adventure provides us with freedom from our daily routines and helps us discover new opportunities for growth and happiness. Adventure helps makes us more successful in our careers and relationships by showing us and the world who we really are. Being safe holds us back, keeps us from realizing our potential, and makes us easier to control and manipulate.
The definition of adventure is only relevant to whoever’s adventure it is. I’ve found adventure in barreling down a steep mountain biking trail at high rate of speed and while snorkeling in a peaceful cove in Hawaii and nearly being run over by four hundred pound sea turtle that seemed to come out of nowhere. While very different, both experiences provided me with a thrill and a sense of danger that required me to think quickly and rely on my abilities. Adventures don’t have to be difficult or put us in physical danger, but they do need to be outside of our ordinary experience with expectations that we will push our boundaries to new levels.
When we allow ourselves to look at life is as a continuous adventure, we can develop a stronger sense of who we are, using it to change our lives for the better. Each adventure changes not just our being, but opens our minds up to possibility, greater success, happiness, and gratitude. Without adventure, we lose our drive, we lose our sense of wonder, and our dreams fade away. Playing it safe will never provide the opportunities to explore everything that life has to offer. Life is always going to hit us with the unexpected (think pandemic) teaching us that everything we think of as safe is just an illusion. Life is never as predictable as we’d like it to be, and changing our mindset to seek adventure helps us better prepare for unexpected events. When life goes upside down, developing a strong sense of adventure is what’s most needed to survive and thrive.
One evening a couple of years ago, on the last night of an action-packed and adventurous long weekend in California. I found myself watching a sunset while perched high on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. The weather was stormy, the waves were crashing hard along the surf, and my senses were heightened. I felt a strong sense of clarity, a great rush of energy and excitement. At that moment I was all alone with my thoughts and was completely in the present. I took deep breathes and allowed nature to takeover my consciousness. made solemn and empowering vows to myself and felt inspired and happy. I felt incredible gratitude for my sense of adventure and the life that I had created for myself. That weekend, I felt that I had learned a secret about how important adventure is to create the life that I want and making my dreams come true.
I like to look at life as just a big game, how we play it matters and creates our outcome. This mindset allows me to be ready for anything and move forward with self-confidence. Some days are going to be harder than others and we will always have setbacks, but embracing adventure keeps us going and gives us the tools to win. Every problem has a solution, and adventure trains us to use our given resources to solve our problems and find our way through life. We can take a more secure and safe path, but adventure challenges us to find solutions that we might not have thought about or felt a need for in the past.
Life is an adventure if we make it an adventure and understand that it’s our own creation and independent of external forces. By making the decision to live life as an adventure we can fully visualize and actualize all of dreams and desires. The more we discover our sense of adventure the more we thrive and live life authentically.
HOW TO FIND ADVENTURE EVERY DAY
The world seems smaller every day, but that also gives us more opportunity for adventure. It gives us more people to connect with and more opportunities. Adventure also provides us with inspirational experiences that can be life-changing, not just for ourselves but everyone around us. We can all experience adventure through thrilling activities or experience it through smaller things that provide us with wonder. Instead of questioning our existence, think about how we’re all connected and that everything we do has a result and consequence.
To create more adventure in your life, start small, develop confidence, and feel how much happier and alive you feel. Do things that make you feel good and give yourself permission to be present in your life and in control:
How to find adventure in everyday life:
1. Change things up, take a different route.
2. Go someplace nearby that you’ve never been to before and explore.
3. Research far-away places that only dreamed about seeing.
4. Remember and bring back hidden skills and, activities that you were good or enjoyed when you were younger but forgot about in adulthood.
5. Break out of your comfort zone and try something that scares you or makes you feel anxious.
6. Consciously make yourself aware of the little things that make you happy in your daily life and feel gratitude.
7. Practice self-awareness and learn to show up for your life.
8. Learn to challenge your beliefs, if something keeps repeating itself it’s time for a shift in mindset.
9. Seek knowledge and truth.
10. Learn the happiness that comes from serving others, be the example and create value with your actions.
Adventure is how we discover who we are and tests the limits of what we're capable of. Adventure teaches us to live and be our best selves.
