Living Adventurously

“That’s not living, that’s just not dying! There's a difference”- The Croods

Last night while I was waiting for my brother, the TV was on and I heard the quote above. And it’s so incredibly true. How much do we focus on just existing, just finding something to fill our days?

This past semester I took an elective called The Adventurous Life, and in it, we explored the idea of adventure, what an adventure entails and how we can live more adventurously.

On the first day, we listed any word that describes “adventure” to us and we soon found that immediately one thinks of death-defying endeavors, danger, and grand feats. But digging deeper we defined this term further. We discussed how an adventure should push us outside our comfort zone to a learned insight, and it’s not always easy or fun all the time, but a journey.

We studied grand adventures like that of the the expedition of Ernest Shackleton (if you haven’t heard of this expedition, please look it up because it truly is an amazing story), the first summit of mount Everest, and more modern ones like Alex Honnold's journey of free soloing the great cliffs of El Capitan (basically this guy climbed a 3000 foot cliff without a rope).

But how do we live a life of adventure? Not all of us can pay the $5000 needed to hire a Sherpa so we can climb Everest. The grand adventurer Alaister Humphrey explored this idea and came up with what he calls “micro-adventures,” adventures we can embark on every day. He even wrote a book about them. His philosophy is that life is too short and we should take it by the reigns and make the most of it.

Jen Pollock Michel recently wrote an article on the new vice of Ease. She explored recent research showing trends that, “bear witness to the ways that we’re increasingly finding embodied life ‘tiresome’’ Even cereal sales have gone down because millennials say its too much to bother with a bowl AND spoon (Its a hard knock life isn’t it?). Overall, we now lead lives in which we strive to be as “unbothered” as possible where “exertion is the enemy of modern life.”

Pollock asks a striking question:

“Who do we become when we’re no longer willing to bother?”

When reflecting on this, I immediately thought we become boring like one of those terrible sleepovers when you’re sitting there with your friend on the couch asking, “What do you wanna do?” Then get the response, "I don't know, what do you wanna do?"

But upon even more reflection, it hit me; God himself calls us to live the adventurous life. We cannot stay in this illusion that we are entitled to ease, we have to do something with the time that is given to us. Even our spiritual journey of finding God and building a relationship with him is NOT based on passivity. Through these adventures we strive to know him better and live more fully in the wonderful world he’s created for us. There’s a big wide world out there, and I’m not gonna see it by letting Netflix auto play another episode.

Jesus told his disciples:

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” John 10:10

God didn’t create us slaves but as his children. Life isn’t meant to be boring. We should have adventures! Jesus’ own ministry was an adventure. But how specifically does living the life of adventure do with our call from God?

The first part of any adventure is action, deciding to actually do something. We live in a life of passivity. For many of us, this is passivity is comprised of thousands of ideas and images thrown at us through screens. But it is adventure that, from beyond, calls us out of this, that calls to us from beyond our everyday monotony. But as I said before, adventure starts with action. Esse quam videri- To BE rather than to seem

This is what Alistair Humphrey references to as “the doorstep mile.” He describes, “For I now know that the hardest part of most adventures is summoning the nerve to begin, to just make it happen.” When reflecting on his great adventure of cycling around the world, he recalled the fear of just putting himself out into “the unknown.”

The Devil actually wishes to keep us in that state. The state of equivocation, fantasizing of future events, and an overall failure to act, a failure to do something. In his famous book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes from the perspective of Screwtape, a senior demon in hell advising another demon in leading the souls of humans to evil. He perfectly illustrates the idea mentioned above.

“There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against [God]. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our [the devil’s] business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them”

Here we see that the devil hates action compared to remaining passive.

“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity… It is far better to make them live in the Future… so that in making them think about it, we make them think of unrealities”

The Devil hates it when we choose action, and he hates it when we choose to live in the present moment, and so he must absolutely hate when we choose to act in the present moment. He wishes us to worry about all that will happen to us in the future or that which has already happened. God calls us to the present, he calls us to action.

This is why the adventurous life is so important. In order to have live life "abundantly," we must live. In order to live, we must act. God wants us to be concerned with what we will do. This is the point where, lying on my bed, I toss my phone away and stand up (have one of those really weird dizzy spells that you get when you've stared at a screen too long and your eyes go all blotchy and travel to some sort of alternate dimension) and just step outside and feel the sun. It is that moment where we decide to act.

Adventure is when we, trusting in God, go out and do something. Adventure rarely begins on a couch and never in our comfort zone. The Devil hates this action and trust.

“It's time for us to more than just survive-

We were made to thrive”- Casting Crowns

Live adventurously! "Verso l'alto"!

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By Catherine Siena