A is for Adventure

I’ve always loved change—thrived on it, even. Sure bad change, like an accident or illness can be, well, bad, but change that involves moving forward is for me always a good thing. I’ve always thought of life itself as an adventure, and have thought the same about some specific things I may have been doing.

But, are they really adventures?

Adventure is usually properly defined as some bold, exciting, unusual and probably risky activity. Life in general may fit that definition sometimes, but day-to-day life probably seldom does. And yet, some of life’s most seemingly mundane tasks can, in my opinion, still be part of a larger adventure.

For a couple years, we lived in Paeroa, a small faming service town in the Waikato. We bought an older house and did it up. The whole experience was, for us, an adventure as we lived in small-town New Zealand and took on building/renovation projects that neither of us had ever done before.

I think most of us have those kinds of adventures. We’re all probably more Huckleberry Finn than Odysseus (probably with a bit of Bill and Ted [watch the trailer] thrown in), which also goes to show that our adventures, even when not the stuff of epics, can still be interesting.

Some of us have adventures when we travel, and if you’re talking about adventure tourism, there’s probably no better place than New Zealand, a country bounding with all sorts of activities. For me, of course, moving to New Zealand was the start of an adventure, so there’s really no need for me to engage in specific activities.

And that’s kind of my point: Adventure is where we find it. Even if we don’t choose to take ten years to sail around trying to get home, what we do can still be an adventure if that’s how we look at it—and I think we should. I love the adventure in change.

What do you consider to be an adventure?

Footnote: I’ve never done an ABC Wednesday blog post before, but thought I’d try it because the discipline involved in participation kind of intrigues me. Still, I thought I’d better keep it simple for the first post, to kind of ease in slowly. We’ll see how it goes. Be sure to check out this week’s posts on other blogs.

The public domain illustration at the top of this post depicts Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" from Stand Magazine (1892).