When I was in my early teenage years, I started looking for adventure because I was feeling restless and discontented. I was always curious and enjoyed learning about new places, which motivated me to venture outside the realm of what I knew.
Adventure as the discovery of the external world.
In my early years, I thought of adventure as exploring the outside world. In
a scene from the `Temple of Doom’, Indiana Jones’s sidekick, Short Round, asks him a question about the Shankara stones. Indiana Jones provides a concise explanation of his motivation: “Fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory.” My fortune and glory were a career in politics. I gravitated to journalism. I thought this would be a practical path to a political career.
While journeying through the external world, I could no longer ignore my interior world. Like a lost traveller, I was overcome by what I
saw. I cautiously moved from the outward to the inner world to navigate through my darkness and confusion in the quest to the `treasure’. The treasure as represented by discovering the purpose of my life.
The quest for adventure: exploring my internal world.
The unconscious is the land of the internal world. I was a reluctant
explorer, but after a period of travelling in India for 3 months during the
early nineties, I returned home to Australia feeling spiritually distraught,
confused and more fearful than ever before. There was something about this trip that touched a raw nerve inside of me. The pain and confusion of self-sabotage behaviour pushed me to go deeper into my inner world and find out what was going on beneath the surface. My India adventure had peeled back the layers to uncover my inner wounds–but it wasn’t all bad news! A whole new world revealed itself to me in greater depth: one that is mysterious and fascinating. A world expressed through the language of dreams, synchronicity and self- awareness.
Finding the hidden treasure or the `gold’ refined in the fires of
adversity.
I looked inward and found the treasure I had been searching for. In the
fires of adversity, I discovered the gold refined through my struggles. The
precious gold that came from the important life lessons and wisdom achieved along the way developed through facing adversity and uncertainty. Adventure is moving out of my comfort zone beyond what I can control and predict. It is being open to new experiences and the willingness to risk failure. Learning to embrace failure without harsh self-judgment was going to be one of my biggest personal challenges.
The next phase of adventure: the entrepreneur’s journey.
After a particularly difficult time in mainstream employment, I was
increasingly drawn to the idea of self-employment. I decided to commit to the entrepreneur’s journey. Like the promise of buried treasure, the dream began to call on me until I could no longer ignore the call. It could be starting a business, following your dreams, starting a family, quitting a job or following your dreams. There are adventures waiting to be discovered in the day- to- day routines of life.
Foolish Times 