Soul of an adventurer

The year is almost up, but the wedding dress is still white and willing to travel...and so this journey will continue. The exciting notion of being an adventuress, and changing the language and connotation of that title, is irresistible  The wedding dress has changed simple trips into something exciting, and has pushed me to try new things in new places.

Simple adventures, accessible adventures, adventures that a working woman...or man...can embark on give our life a deeper meaning. Helen Keller discovered this and said that "life is a daring adventure or nothing at all."  Adventures need not take us to Nepal or Machu Pichu, or to the feet of a guru in Tibet, though these are wonderful places to go if the resources are available. Adventures can occur everyday in some small way that invigorates our souls and minds. Adventures truly are born in our souls and then lived out-loud.

What do I mean? We have probably all seen someone travel who only noticed the inconvenience of the trip. There is an old joke about two men crossing the Reed Sea while the water is split around them. The people around them were in awe as they looked up at the water towering above them, but these two men were looking down and only saw the mud.

            "For this we left Egypt" they muttered? "For muddy feet we should feel grateful?" they asked. For these two men there was no miracle, no adventure, perhaps no sense of freedom, only mud. I knew people in a little town in Oklahoma who traveled the world, but were always relieved to come home and eat doughnuts at the local cafe. The rest of the world was different, and hence frightening and to be be avoided.

The same thing can happen when we travel on any adventure. We can notice how crowded the plane is, how the food does not taste like home, how hot or cold it is, and miss the beauty of the clouds, the uniqueness of the sky, the distinctiveness of smells, and the opportunities to awaken our minds. We can travel at great cost to great distances and never have more than a mind-numbing experience of fatigue.

Or we can walk in a park close to home that we have never visited and find a new world. We can take a class and learn a new skill or idea or way to approach life and find ourselves awake and alive in a new way. We can taste something, taking one dance lesson, or getting on a sailboat in a lake, trying a new 5K before committing to a 6 week course, or living on a sailboat, or running a marathon. 

We can become adventurers one shift in perspective at a time.

With our without a wedding dress.