"It's funny, I went through a season where I thought I wanted a nice, quiet life. Now (a few years later) I look around and my life it is wild and a daily adventure. The last thing I want is a quiet life"
Amen and amen.
I want adventure. Crazy, wild adventure.
I've got the crazy covered; in the form of four kids and a husband with an unpredictable creative industry business.
Sensibility tells me that this is enough; "Look for the adventure in your daily life", but I've never been all that sensible.
The book I'm working through, Restless, asks you to think back to different seasons of life and pick a moment when you felt the most satisfied and happy.
The moment when I felt that way as a little girl, I was misbehaving, big time misbehaving.
My best friend, Julie and I used to play out grand adventure in her backyard and one day we were two runaway girls that find an abandoned mountain cottage (her treehouse) to live in (think Heidi meets Swiss Family Robinson). Never did two little girls have so much fun sweeping sand off a wood floor or arranging purple blossomed weeds artfully in a broken plastic vase. We were free agents in the Alps or Appalachians or wherever we were.
Julie, lapsing out of character for a minute, mentioned that she had never seen real mountains. We lived in Tampa at the time, the biggest hills being sand dunes.
"Let's go. I'll take you"
And within minutes I was back in my own bedroom around the corner wildly packing a satchel with essentials like my porcelain doll and Clue (our favorite game). She was doing the same at her house and she managed to squeeze her "The Jets" cassette in her bag. We met at the corner with just over two dollars between us; our first stop was the 7Eleven near the entrance of our neighborhood. We were going to need food, of course. Don't think we weren't be smart about the the thing.
I can still remember how absolutely exhilarated we felt hurrying down the sidewalk towards the open road. Our real abandoned cottage was waiting for us and we had so much adventure ahead of us.
We were wild a free and ready to go anywhere our "color-your-own" Keds would lead us.
They led us about half-a-mile away from home where the sound of the screeching tires of a black convertible mustang stopped us in our tracks and a very angry Julie's mom escorted us back home
Julie went to tears in the front seat, I fell into side-splitting laughter. The consequence of this disobedience was sure to be terrible, but I was too thrilled to worry about that.
We were grounded for a whole week from seeing each other; an eternity for us, but I did not even care.
It was so worth it.
Adventure always is worth it and so is all the risk that goes along with.
Quiet and simple equal boring in my book, maybe that's just me. Maybe some people are called to a quiet life.
Give me adventure and the sweaty-palmed adrenaline that goes with.
I know the good-girl answer is to look for adventure in my daily life, in the diapers and extracurricular activities, but that will leave me the girl in tears because the consequences of those adventure outweigh the risk.
I want to look for adventure in post-Christian wilds of Western Europe and amongst unhygienic and wild faithful the of third-world, and I want to be laughing the whole way.
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