Adventure Post of Adventure-ness (2 AM Edition!)

Disclaimer: My fabulous cousins are in from South Africa on their annual trek to the United States and as such this is going to be a relatively short post, as I'm rather busy and will continue to be during the next week or so.

Disclaimer Number 2: 

It is 2 AM. I am sleepy. This will be rambly.

Moving on.

My grandest adventure, hm?

To be honest, “adventure” seems a pretentious word to use, to me. It implies a journey, feelings of new discovery and resulting insights into the world around us. It has connotations of that sense of prickly danger on one's skin and pleasantly anxious tightening in the chest as you charge forward on a beautiful and perilous undertaking toward New Things and the Beautiful Unknown, standing atop a mountain or navigating the U.S. in an unreliable vehicle with (hopefully) slightly more reliable friends that never fail to make you laugh.

Frankly, from my personal experience, this is extremely hard to come by, especially at the young age people who use the word typically are. It's more of a word that tumblr addicts use to put a name on this teenage ideal they wish they had the energy to go out and pursue (but instead paste with pretty fonts over nature-y backgrounds with a sense of brooding, yearning angst). So I don't like to use the term in everyday conversation.

But, persnicketies aside, the closest I've come to experiencing this sort of sensation is when I was a kid and everything beyond my backyard kind of buzzed with that electric, magically fun sense of immediate peril. Especially at my friend Cat's house, when we would venture into her woods when her parents were away and climb up into this enormously tall tree stand, sitting and overlooking the Lands Surrounding with an air of throned Narnian queens. She, her cousin (and mutual friend) Virginia and I would pretend we could control elements in the wickedly kick-butt manner of Last Airbender characters and were sort of heroes in this make believe world we had between the Tree Stand and the Creak. The Creak was a muddy trickle of an ordeal that served as the line beyond which Magical Things were probable to occur. Arachnia is the name we came up with for this realm. (Apparently, add -nia to any moderately cool-sounding prefix and BAM. Alternate fantasy world, done.)

So yeah. Childhood. That was when everything felt like an adventure by its traditional definition, places and things being innately new and mysterious and interesting, and that was wonderful. I think it's important to not lose touch with that side of ourselves, even as we grow, and perhaps even one day quit yearning for this unattainable perfect summer journey full of whimsy and ridiculously witty dialogue with the helpless desire that we do. Because unless you are a John Green character, it probably isn't going to happen the way we envision it.

Don't color me pessimistic, though. It doesn't mean you won't have good times, because you will (you'll have some great ones too, if you're lucky). It doesn't mean you won't exchange witty dialogue from occasion to occasion, or laugh so hard you fall over at something devastatingly hysterical a friend says. But it does mean that we all should appreciate these things when they happen because they usually won't be lumped together in one great big fabulous and oft-romanticized summer stew.

If one learns to see an adventure in everything they experience then life suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. Let's all stop brooding and do something today.

Talk to you all next week, hopefully in a more coherent and eloquent manner.

Elizabeth