Applying the Adventurous Mindset: Room Travel with a French Aristocrat
An 18th-century book teaches us how to apply the lens of adventure to nearly any setting we may find ourselves in—even if confined to a single room.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes”
-Marcel Proust
One should never underestimate the power of the human mind to reframe one’s situation. There is perhaps no piece of literature that exemplifies this more than A Journey Around My Room by the 18th-century French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre. De Maistre recounts his perspective after being sentenced to confinement in a single room for 42 days as punishment for taking part in an illegal duel. Rather than sulk and moan and drive himself mad with cabin fever, as many of us are wont to do under such restrictive conditions, he cleverly adopts the mindset of a voyager and envisions his room as a wide-open space to be explored. The book ends up being a powerful reminder of the mind's capacity for intrigue and applying a brilliant salve of mindfulness to an otherwise monotonous experience.
I have often wondered how I would handle solitary confinement. While I have practiced meditation and mindfulness for nearly six years, I still have a difficult time imagining how I would fare under such restrictions. And I don’t mean to make light of solitary confinement. It sounds like a horrible experience, and I wouldn’t wish such psychological torment on anyone. However, it’s also true that one’s mind is capable of reframing almost any situation, finding silver linings and ways of coping if only we can get ourselves to see things differently. But there lies the challenge.
As children, we have no difficulty in applying the adventurous mindset and can easily see the wonder and awe in the world instantaneously. However, as adults, our minds tend to morph to become more rigid and somehow lose that sense of childlike wonderment. Why?
We are inclined to view this situation of de Maistre’s confinement as maddening, inducing immediate panic and outrage at having our liberty taken away. We could easily become fixated on acts of revenge on the people who put us there or we have the option to adopt a completely radical mindset. Granted, de Maistre seems to have had the French aristocratic version of solitary confinement with a butler to wait on his every beck and call in what sounds like a rather cushy apartment setting. And yet even this situation would drive most of us crazy after a day or two. Like most creatures, humans do not like being cornered in cramped spaces. De Maistre somehow manages to summon the mental fortitude to envision his time as an adventure rather than kick and scream and punch holes in the wall as I imagine many of us would do.
So how does he do this?
Early on he reveals how he applies his adventurous mindset as one full of spontaneity and serendipity rather than rigid planning:
I don’t like people who have their itineraries and ideas so clearly sorted out that they say, ‘Today I’ll make three visits, I’ll write four letters, and I’ll finish that book I started.’ My soul is so open to every kind of idea, taste and sentiment; it so avidly receives everything that presents itself!...And why would it turn down the pleasures that are scattered along life’s difficult path? They are so few and far between, so thin on the ground, that you’d need to be mad not to stop, and even turn away from your path, and pick up all of those that lie within reach. There’s no more attractive pleasure, in my view, than following one’s ideas wherever they lead, as the hunter pursues his game, without even trying to keep to any set route. And so, when I travel through my room, I rarely follow a straight line: I go from my table towards a picture hanging in the corner; from there I set out obliquely towards the door; but even though, when I begin, it really is my intention to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado. It’s an excellent piece of furniture, an armchair; above all, it’s highly useful for every man inclined to meditation.
Long before I encountered the work of de Maistre, I too stumbled upon this idea that adventure is entirely about one’s mindset rather than a particular quality of experience or rigid planning. In previous posts, such as Adventure as a Mindset and Traveling Versus Wandering, I discussed how adventure is a state of being and philosophy of life and that our travels do not necessarily need to be elaborate or exotic, distant or remote, life-threatening, or foolhardy. They can be done just about anywhere by anyone. Like de Maistre, I too discovered how thrilling and transformative it could be to take a simple jaunt around my rather boring rural hometown,
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.
Allowing the world to pull us along and follow what grabs our attention is all that is required to completely reorient how we become intrigued by what is already happening around us. It is remarkably powerful and yet so simple as that.
There is perhaps no greater lived example of Marcel Proust’s dictum that “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” than Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room. Though one suspects de Maistre is embellishing at times, it is nonetheless a remarkable exercise in mindfulness, and I encourage anyone reading this to both read this short work and consider applying the adventurous mindset. If one can apply the adventurous outlook to a single room, one can do so in nearly every setting we may find ourselves in.
Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB
Today's post gave me much to think about. It brought to mind the comic strip, "Family Circus", which would occasionally highlight the wandering, circuitous route taken by a youngster while traveling from Point A to Point B. Your post also prompted a long ago memory of a burned out customer whose common response to an initial greeting was "same old sh**, just a different day". Finally, the concept of maintaining an adventurous mindset, regardless of physical restrictions, can be so important to prisoners, shut-ins, and others.
Like you, I’ve often walked an area to see what might not be obvious from afar. Love that Proust quote! An enjoyable read.