I call my blog the Art of Adventure. Seems like a great title, because it sounds exciting and it has two words that begin with the letter A, which means if you look on the white pages of the internet it should come up early. Cause I guess that’s why AAA auto names itself that.

Anyway, there a couple of definitions that I would like to point out:

Art
/ärt/
Noun
1. A skill acquired by experience, study, or observation
2. The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture,…: “the art of the Renaissance”

Ad•ven•ture
/adˈvenCHər/
Noun:
1. An unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity.

These are an excellent starting point, but what does the Art of Adventure mean? I will focus mostly on Adventure as a concept, because I included “Art” in the title to simply mean the creative practice of getting yourself into an adventure.

Adventure is when you stumble around and don’t really know where you are going. You can have this in your daily life or you can have it when you are traveling. Perhaps it is easier to get into an adventure when you travel, but it is probably a good idea to learn how to have an adventure when you are at home.

Adventure is a challenge of the mind when you let yourself (or force yourself to) do something that it not in your wheelhouse. For example, I am pretty good at cycling and sometimes I let myself go out and do more cycling, rather than branch out and try new sports. The last time I had an adventure while cycling was when something unexpected happened (which was that I rode a switchback well on the MTB).

An adventure gives you a good story. Do you have to feel uncomfortable in order to have a good story? Or do you merely have have to have an emotional connect to a setting (i.e. does looking out over the grand canyon and feeling awe count as an adventure?). If you are in a tight spot, you are probably in the middle of an adventure.

Here is one of my favorite adventure quotes: “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” Chesterton, Gilbert K. In hindsight you can see that something was an adventure. So maybe adventure is all in your frame of mind. If you choose to place yourself in a situation where you are uncomfortable or have a problem to solve and then you put you mind to work and enjoy the experience, then you will have an adventure. The trick is recognizing an adventure while it is happening and going with it.

People widely love their undergraduate institutions more than their grad schools, in part, I think, because of the adventure of being an undergrad. There are so many new things that you are forced to navigate your way through and you have no choice. Grad school is the second time around, and for most people they are already good at school. For myself, grad school seemed like a safe haven rather than an unknown entity compared to undergrad.

An adventure fills your memory with what I called Harry Potter moments. Ever notice any characters in Harry Potter doing anything mundane? Even when they were in the library they were discovering something special. In Life, your brain will leave out all the mundane details and you will be left with the highlight reel. So, if you can cram more memorable moments into any given time span you will have a better (more adventurous) highlight reel. You have to force yourself into an new or uncomfortable situations in increase the number of scenes in your highlight reel.

This blog, the Art of Adventure will attempt to share many different ways that you can begin to have an adventure. Expert adventurers can give you their personal formulas and stories, but just like the apprenticeships in the days of yore, the student must eventually become the master (after much trial and error). Therefore, I expect each post to be a jumping off point to begin to think about your next adventure. This blog will serve to highlight human creative skill and imagination when it comes to finding exciting and meaningful things to fill your life with.