The Anticipation of Adventure
Nobody sets out to lose their sense of wonder.
We misplace it a little at a time, somewhere between the first paycheck and the hundredth status meeting. In its place we install a life of routine: predictable, controllable, and about as thrilling as a well-organized sock drawer.
Then, we stand in front of that drawer and wonder why we're unhappy.
The cure isn't complicated. We need some zest. We need to be shaken up, stretched, and occasionally proven wrong. Few things do that better than leaving home on purpose.
And here's what most people miss: the adventure starts long before the airport.
A trip on the calendar is a light at the end of a tunnel you didn't know you were in. The dreary Tuesdays, the weeks when work and life conspire to arrive all at once, get easier to bear when there's a date circled in big red sharpie sit out yonder. It's a pressure valve you install in advance. Hope, with a boarding time.
Then there's the planning, which is the closest most of us come to designing our lives on paper. A trip is yours to build. Put in what makes you curious. Cut what doesn't. Better yet, use it as a dress rehearsal. Wonder whether you and your wife could live in a tiny home? Rent one for a long weekend. A hundred and twenty square feet is plenty of room for two people and not nearly enough for one snore. Tempted to move to a city where nobody knows your name? Live there for a week first. A trial run is cheap. Ripping the Band-Aid off a life you've never tested is not, and that particular Band-Aid tends to take some skin with it.
Once a year I take what I call an "unplug sabbatical". The screens go as dark as I can manage, and I go somewhere new, do something new, or at least wander the corners of a familiar place I've been too lazy to find. The point being to get out of my head and back to living in the first person. Really seeing. Really connecting, with people and with the land. Having my preconceptions knocked over and discovering they were mostly held up by habit.
The alternative is the plan most of us are sold: save the living for later. Hang your hopes on a retirement full of hypotheticals. The trouble is that someday makes a poor travel agent. By the time it arrives, the knees may have filed their objections, and dreams left in storage for forty years may not fit anymore. Plenty of people reach the finish line only to find they no longer can, or no longer care to.
Don't save the good china for company that never comes. Do it now. Maybe not all at once but layered in.
Let me confess how I practice what I preach, since I don't always do it gracefully.
This year my wife and I had a baby, which rearranges a calendar the way a bear rearranges a campsite. Without regard for what was there.
We go to Estonia every year. That's my wish, and my wife kindly indulges it. Ireland has sat near the top of both our lists for years, right up there with Finland, which we crossed off on our honeymoon. So as we talked about this year's trip, we did what sensible new parents do: we hedged. We weren't sure we could get the time. We weren't sure how it would work. We were well on our way to a very reasonable decision not to go.
So I booked our flights.
Five days in Ireland, no itinerary. It costs more. The logistics are a nuisance. I booked it anyway, on the strength of popular opinion and my conviction that we'd figure it out, a strategy that has worked for me about as often as it hasn't, which I consider an "excellent average".
Here's why it mattered. We want our children to grow up adventuring, and children don't learn what you tell them. They learn what you do.
Our daughter is too young to remember this trip, and that's fine. She wasn't the audience. We were. We booked it, planned it, and went when it wasn't convenient, because it never will be. From here the family grows, the calendar fills, and everything we care about gets harder to fit. That isn't a reason to wait. It's the reason not to. The things you value don't survive on good intentions. They survive on what you're willing to put on the calendar and pay for.
Now comes my favorite part. I've heard more stories about Ireland than I can count: the cliffs, the pubs, a green that supposedly doesn't look real. And I've done my level best to avoid the pictures. I want to meet the place the way you ought to meet anyone worth knowing, without having read their file first. No spoilers. No opinions borrowed from strangers. Just a date on the calendar, a head full of rumors, and the particular pleasure of not knowing yet.
That's the anticipation of adventure. It's the first half of every trip, and the only half you can start today.
The right time isn't coming. Book the wrong one.