I watched the movie Man on Wire recently. It traced the path of a French man, from the moment he first saw the Twin Towers in a newspaper, to the moment that he strung an illegal wire between them and walked across it. Afterwards he was arrested. People were appalled, excited and confused. He’d done it with no safety net, no rope around his waist, and no parachute. As he walked across the wire, back and forth for 45 minutes, he laughed and smiled. If he had fallen he would have died. Later when the police had him they asked ‘why did you do it?’, and he responded with a smile and a shrug of his shoulders. The beauty of that shrug and sense of adventure really struck me, and I started thinking, have we lost our sense of adventure? And if so how can we find it?
I think adventure has three features, they are:
- Adventure is bigger than you, and it expands your world.
- It requires courage. You face danger. There is a chance of failure.
- You either use your strengths or develop them along the way.
I started thinking that maybe we have lost our sense of adventure. Things seem very normal nowadays. I guess I always felt that in the past adventure was easy, you could float out onto the ocean and never know what was over the horizon. People used to think it was the end of the world. Or you could walk over the hill to the next town, and it would take three days of seeing no one.
Today we have the internet to tell us what is at the end of the horizon. We can access everything and everyone from everywhere. I can twitter to Bruce Willis while I Skype my sister in London and Google what exotic meal to make for dinner.
Today we have more of everything, to the extent that we are killing the planet and ourselves. I have more stuff than I can poke a stick at. And more sticks to do it with. The sickness of the Western world is obesity, while people starve on the other side of the planet. We have so much that it is easy not to focus on what’s important.
Today we are obsessed with safety. Not just physically but in other ways, emotionally and socially too. So how do we find our modern day adventures?
It struck me that there are ways we can find adventure in our everyday lives, like our friend who wandered between the twin towers 400m above the earth. Firstly we can simplify our lives, and prioritise. Tear our eyes away from the latest episode of someone’s life I don’t care about, and look around our own living rooms. Being mindful about what we do helps us see the excitement in the world.
Secondly we can challenge ourselves and fight mediocrity. It may mean speaking up in a meeting, or pushing ourselves rather than not. It may mean chasing your dreams, or even looking like a dork.
And finally we can take a chance. We can take a chance that we might be wrong, or right.
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