Two months ago I was on a cruise ship making its way through the Mediterranean towards the Atlantic. My friend Brian and I sat down to dinner and were surprised when we were joined by two girls our age, Lucia and Andreea. Cruises aren’t exactly known for hosting people under forty, let alone pretty Romanian girls.
Fast forward two weeks and we say our goodbyes without remembering to exchange contact information. There’s a dreamlike atmosphere aboard a cruise ship that makes you forget about practical things like that.
I visit a friend for a few hours in Miami, and then he drops me off at the airport. I’ve got about ten minutes to kill before boarding, so I fire up my web browser and start digging through sites I’d been neglecting on the ship. TheFlightDeal is one of them, and there’s a huge headline about an obscure European booking site charging about half what it should for all flights between the US and Europe.
I hate to see a good deal go to waste, and Romania is on the mind. There are questions that could be asked, like: will I be able to get in touch with the girls before I get there? Is Bucharest miserable in the winter? Will they even be in town? Will they want a visitor they’ve only known for a couple weeks?
Of course, I book the ticket.
So this past weekend Lucia and I took a train trip around the Romania. We went to the top of a mountain and visited Peles castle (amazing!) in Sinaia, and then took a bus to Brasov in Transylvania, where we visited Dracula’s castle, amongst other things. On the train ride back we learned Morse code so that we can send secret messages by tapping each other.
Then last night I visited their apartment in Bucharest where we had an amazing meal that they cooked. As we sat at their table in the kitchen, we were all struck by the symmetry of the circumstances. We met at a dinner table on a ship in the middle of nowhere, and now we were sitting at a dinner table again in Bucharest. We talked about how we when we first met, we would have never guessed that we’d be having dinner together in Romania.
That’s the essence of adventure, creating a path through life where outcomes are uncertain, but likely to be good and sure to be interesting. Having a sense of adventure is to be so curious about the world that nothing but firsthand experience can satisfy that curiosity.
Adventure comes in all forms. I remember trampling through the woods as a kid, climbing trees, building forts, and exploring. That was adventure. After high school my friends and I piled into a borrowed van and did a dirt-cheap road trip around the eastern United States. That was adventure, too. And, of course, there are the more obvious adventures I do now, like visiting Romania with only about two minutes of rational thought.
In thinking about this post, I realized that the standard path in life doesn’t afford much adventure beyond a very young age. That’s because there is no mysterious unknown in the middle-class existence of school / work / family / retirement. All of those paths are so well-worn by now that we all know what to expect. That’s not to say that there aren’t great aspects of those things, only that they aren’t sources of adventure.
I wonder if that’s why people watch so much TV and play so many video games. Both are socially acceptable ways to simulate adventure and to feel some of the same emotions you might feel while living a life of adventure.
To have adventure in your life, you have to seek it out. You have to be willing to make leaps of faith into the unknown and accept reasonable risks. Maybe you’ll get lost. Maybe you’ll get bored. Maybe you’ll get your heart broken. Maybe you’ll offend someone or be offended. Maybe you’ll like it so much that you won’t be able to live life passively anymore. That can be scary, too.
If you don’t want to have adventure in your life, that’s fine. Everyone’s different and different attitudes are appropriate for different phases in life. But if the idea of adventure appeals to you and isn’t part of your life, you need to do something about it. You can’t wait for adventure to find you. You have to create it yourself by embracing the unknown, making yourself uncomfortable, and, most of all, by following your curiosity whether it seems logical or not. It’s a choice.
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Photo is looking out of a window at Dracula’s Castle. Dracula was based on Vlad the Impaler, and this was his castle.
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