Adventure as a Mindset
Adventure is a state of being and philosophy of life and they need not be elaborate or exotic, distant or remote, life-threatening, or foolhardy. They can be done just about anywhere by anyone.
“No matter how much the adventure seems to rest on a differentiation within life, life as a whole may be perceived as an adventure.”
-Georg Simmel, The Adventure
Adventure is and has always been an integral human behavior, both ingrained in us culturally and biologically. Indeed, the history of humanity is a story of adventure unto itself as I have written previously. Adventure can mean many things for many different people, but it is often described as a perspective, a mindset, a philosophy of life, and a way of experiencing the world. That’s the way I prefer to look at adventure anyway. Ultimately, what is most liberating about this is that it means adventure is open to all of us in one form or another.
The German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel describes adventure in his 1911 essay Das Abenteuer (translated as The Adventure or The Adventurer) not in terms of the content or sequence of events necessarily but as a “form of experiencing.” The adventure is ultimately a fresh experience that challenges an individual to actively engage with new environments and systems of being and thinking. The adventurer then is a person who takes a risk and attempts to see beyond their initial apprehensions and the likely perils they may face charting into the unknown. They become captivated by the significance, benefits, and insights a given journey will inevitably bring them. Being adventurous is not easily acquired nor is it easily kept, but it is readily accessible to nearly all of us if we are daring enough to see it and work to structure it into our lives. Adventure is therefore a frame of mind.
The logic goes that there is a lot that can be considered adventurous, and all humans seem biologically primed to explore and grow. I recall as a child one of the first moments I became aware of the wider world. We lived in between two sets of railroad tracks and for a time that defined the boundaries of my entire world besides going to school and going to my grandparents’ house. Standing on the tracks one day and looking back and forth in both directions it dawned on me that these tracks carried on for vast distances in both directions and I had a surge of adventure enter my mind. I wanted to know where those tracks went and for how far. To this day, I still love a jaunt down some railroad tracks.
Thus, it is not required that someone be Ernest Hemingway running with the bulls in Pamplona, Theodore Roosevelt stalking lions on the African savanna, John Muir tramping barefoot in the Sierra Nevada, or Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascending Mt. Everest to qualify as adventurous.
All one needs is the imagination and willingness to keep pushing themselves into unknown and yet-to-be-experienced realms of life. Adventures need not be elaborate or exotic, distant or remote, life-threatening, or foolhardy. Neither are adventures necessarily something solely entitled to the extreme risk-takers of the world or the well-to-do elites. They can simply be in the backyard, your hometown, the next county over, a neighboring state, or virtually anywhere that changes our perception of something. As Thoreau once said,
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
Maintaining one’s wanderlust has everything to do with being aware of what opportunities are available to you and your willingness to be creative and receptive to those opportunities.
Adventure is all about doing something bold or something we might be nervous or afraid to do: beginning a new workout routine; training a new martial art; visiting a museum never explored before; wandering around a state forest; taking a walk down the railroad tracks to see where it leads; making the effort to spontaneously hop in the car for a road trip to visit old friends; devising an entirely new “scenic” route to work; living a week without a personal vehicle and phone to experience other ways of navigating a town or city; interacting with someone or a group we’ve never interacted with before; picking up a new genre of book or hobby we’ve been “too good for”; or simply letting ourselves become lost in a new landscape.
Adventures ultimately lie more so on a spectrum of risk and imagination rather than time and distance. Lastly, adventures can simply be doing something on a whim with little or no planning, letting our day simply unfold as we engage with it, “living in the present,” as we say.
Being proactive in renewing the freshness of our experiences will keep the childish impulse of discovery and creativity afire as we age, even if it means being a little mindless in seeing where and how far our feet can take us. In a previous post, I discussed the meaning of wandering and reflected on the epiphany I had years ago on what it meant to see the world through the lens of adventure:
When I was a teenager, I once spent the entire day walking aimlessly in cheap sandals from my home into town. Tramping the railroad tracks, I followed the river, down back streets, into an old bookstore, and back up the highway which ended up totaling some 16 miles at the day’s end. It was the farthest I’d ever walked and it never occurred to me that I could walk so far in a single day. All I did was let the world pull me along and follow what grabbed my attention. It was all on a whim and I couldn’t explain why I did it, but the day ended up being incredibly fulfilling though my feet were utterly crippled afterward. I saw a boring town I’d driven through hundreds of times in a completely new way. The experience was quite an epiphany and had a profound impact on me. I ended up doing something like this every chance I got and still never came close to seeing everything there was to see in my relatively unexciting small rural Indiana town. These experiences made me realize just how vast and arguably infinite our planet is, that we are the arbiters of our adventures, and that learning to wander is a far more exciting way to engage with just about any place you may find yourself.
During my time at Indiana University, when I became restless from studying, I would plunge into the evening streets to explore the campus and town. I eventually found myself among a group of homeless people on Kirkwood Avenue. At first, the experience was unsettling because I held poor judgments about them based on sheer inexperience of being around homeless people and a cowardly refusal to interact. The ugly popular opinion suggested they were little more than a group full of potential criminals and freeloaders. The societal judgment was overtly harsh and simplistic, which was apparent after just a few minutes of honest chatter. Afterward, I felt incredibly grateful to have found myself in their presence and listened to their life stories which turned out to be quite profound, sometimes harrowing, and occasionally downright unbelievable.
Time and again, I conducted more of these adventurous forays into unfamiliar territory. These small adventures had me face uncomfortable situations only to realize more of my past apprehensions about other people and places were shamefully unfounded and based on unreasonable fears. Randomly dropping myself into uncomfortable situations became a minor obsession for a while partly because I was a budding anthropologist but mainly because, as a reclusive introvert, I wanted desperately to discover how to become more sociable. For a while, I adopted the carpe diem attitude of Jim Carrey’s character in Yes Man as a means to overcoming my introverted tendencies and forcing myself to say yes to just about all social invitations unhesitantly.
Many of us conceive of adventure as something exotic or foreign, distant, and often expensive, and something “out there,” far away that we do only on occasion. We think of it as a thing, “I’m going on an adventure.” We carve out specific segments of our lives into categories of “adventure” and “not adventure.” Our relationship with adventure reflects the kind of society we currently inhabit—one that envisions life as transactional. Because of this, we think of adventures as vacations, as something we go and do, something we purchase for a limited subscription, going on Safari, a Caribbean cruise, or a resort in Cancun. I do not believe this is a useful way to view adventure and argue that we should view it more in terms of a mindset, perspective, philosophy of life, or form of experiencing as Simmel wrote about.
Adventure is thus a process or a mindset and a way for us to envision our world and our place in it—as active agents seeking to cultivate a more adventurous worldview.
May your weekend and coming weeks be full of adventures, big or small.
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Cheers!
-JSB
I was staying in a tented camp in Tanzania. The camp was situated above a small river, and my tent directly over the larger watering hole. A herd of about 13 elephants - a breeding herd, there were babies, adolescents, mini-matriarchs, and the matriarch - stopped to drink. They were there for an hour, and I watched from above completely enthralled by how they cared for each other. They drank, they sprayed themselves, and moved on. That hour of peaceful watching was an adventure, unexpected and pure.
Once again your post resonates with me:
'we should view [adventure] more in terms of a mindset, perspective, philosophy of life, or form of experiencing...'
It's funny, but I viewed starting my PhD three years ago as a bit of an adventure. I entered the unknown, and found a whole new world!