This week’s Discover Challenge: Adventure
Adventure, by definition: An adventure is an exciting or unusual experience. It may also be a bold, usually risky undertaking, with an uncertain outcome. Adventures may be activities with some potential for physical danger such as exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, river rafting or participating in extreme sports. The term also broadly refers to any enterprise that is potentially fraught with physical, financial or psychological risk, such as a business venture, a love affair, or other major life undertakings.
Adventure can also be of the mind. Writers go on an adventure whenever they have a blank piece of paper before them. Artists go on an adventure when they have a blank canvas presented to them – the medium with which they interpret their art (paint, charcoal, pencil, crayon, colored pencil, tactile materials) is entirely theirs to choose – that’s usually an adventure unto itself! Music can take the listener on an adventure. Have you ever listened to those CDs of storms and oceans? Better yet, have you actually sat and listens to those sounds live? That’s an adventure to take!
My favorite adventure involves crafting my writing ideas and posts, whether they’re on this blog, for posts like this, the writing prompts, or some of the other things that make Allison’s Written Words what it is, or on Retroist, when I choose to discuss something from the past. I feel like an archaeologist, digging through the past and seeing what adventures and misadventures I can come up with. I love exploring the rarer and more obscure side of nostalgia, an area that people either don’t tread because they forgot about it, or because they don’t think people will read about it.
It is also an adventure when it turns out that one person who found what you wrote (also on an adventure) knows five other people who enjoy the same thing. Or they were all looking for the same thing, and I found it, and didn’t know each other. It’s like they were on an adventure to find that one thing, and their adventure sent them my way.
I’m the writer/adventurer that firmly believes in the “3 am wake-up” idea. And thankfully for me, my ideas aren’t waking me up night. I’m convinced I’ve trained my mind to remember the “3 am wake-up” ideas until I’m awake at an appropriate time (on weekdays, this is 5:30 am, and weekends at 8 am or whenever I wake up). If it comes to mind, I am compelled to jot it down, or if my laptop is handy (and it always is), get it typed out immediately. My feeling is, if you have a great idea, run with it. That’s where the adventure comes in – you have the great idea, and the adventure involves having to research it – back it up with videos, pictures, perhaps some witty commentary.
Whatever the adventure, make sure it is the best possible one you can have. You have one chance to get it right, so own it!
