Heeding The Call To Adventure

Lessons from travel and the drive for voluntary suffering

A few days before my 40th birthday, I signed up for an expedition blending survival training with leadership development into the remote desert wilderness of Dark Canyon, Utah. Here’s a trailer.

Photo by David Billings on Unsplash

I chalk it up to a mid-life crisis of sorts and this is how mine is shaping up. I guess I have my dad to thank for inspiration — for his 50th birthday, he “Houdini’d” out of his own party only to dramatically re-enter via skydiving. 

Even though I also have a trip to Egypt planned at the end of this year, (over two years in the making with COVID delays), upon hearing this opportunity I felt a full-body tingle of excitement eliciting a Derek Sivers inspired “Hell yeah!”

I propose that each of us has a thermostat of sorts that measures the relative amount of monotony in our lives. To put it another way, each of us has differing needs for certainty and variety, two of the six according to the Robbins-Madanes model. In each of us there lives a dance between anxiety and curiosity in our orientation to the unknown. Every so often, this yearning accumulates for something disruptive to the everyday. I imagine it is an aspect of those scoring highly on the trait openness to experience from the Big Five personality framework.

My life has been periodically punctuated by such episodes throughout my adult life – my first solo trip couchsurfing and hitchhiking around Europe that began with a one-way ticket to Paris in 2009, working aboard cruise ships from 2011-2015 as a showband musician, a Vipassana silent meditation retreat in 2014, both a month-long intensive yoga teacher training and a trip to China to study kung fu in 2016. In recent years, adventures veered slightly inward emphasizing meditative, contemplative and plant medicine explorations, though it has been a while since my last travels except some local touring with a band.

Travel has had a special place in my development over the years. And while I’m incredibly grateful for the privilege of numerous family vacations over the decades, the challenges and opportunities that arise while traveling alone have been incredibly enriching.

Some insights include the resilient autonomy that comes from choosing one’s experience, self-knowledge about balancing planning with spontaneity, and taking on the task of making new social connections in foreign situations.

Though I do not know precisely what this next adventure has in store for me, I expect to be challenged across the board: physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and perhaps even spiritually.

This drive to take on voluntary suffering brings to mind a quote from Seneca:

“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent – no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”

And to that end, I say let’s find out what we’re made of.

Adventure awaits!

Let’s goooooooo!