Life as an Adventure

My dad as a young sports writer in Binghamton, New York
My dad as a young sports writer in Binghamton, New York
Life, at its best, is an adventure – not always successful, not always happy, but a compelling narrative worth living and sharing with others. Though he never said it in so many words, that was one of the most compelling lessons I learned from my dad, exemplified in how he lived his life, and how he inspired others to do the same. I try to frame my own life as an adventure (or maybe better, a series of them), exemplify that in how I live day to day, and inspire my kids to do the same.

Maybe the greatest adventure my dad ever inspired was in the late 1940s when he convinced my mom (at the time just a friend, they were not engaged or even a couple) to accompany him to Ann Arbor (some 600 miles west of where they both lived in Binghamton, New York), promising her that after a year of establishing residency, he could get her into the University of Michigan. They lived separately for several years and continued their relationship as friends while he got his bachelor’s degree in English and my mom hers in Sociology. Eventually they did become a couple, married and my brother and I were born. It was certainly a very unorthodox adventure, particularly for a single young woman during that period.

Other grand adventures stage-managed by my dad (and mom to) were car and train trips back East from Ann Arbor either to visit my mom’s parents in Binghamton (usually for Christmas) or to Cape Cod (for summer vacations by the ocean). The train trips were always exciting odysseys, taken overnight in a small sleeping compartment through long dark tunnels, snowy winter countryside and crossing iceberg-choked rivers. The car trips were equally exciting, with my mom and dad putting down the back seats of our station wagons and arranging the entire area with cushions, blankets and pillows and my brother and I picking out various toys to bring along to facilitate the imaginary space and submarine adventures we would play out during the trip.

Finally he facilitated my brother and I having our own imaginary adventures by configuring our unfinished basement with simple brick and board toy shelves and a big low table of particle-board on wood boxes to facilitate our extensive narrative imagination play in that venue with our plastic soldiers and dinosaurs, Lincoln logs, blocks, and other such paraphernalia.

My dad (and mom’s) example and encouragement inspired me as an older youth and young adult to launch into many adventures myself including my many theater projects, travelling to the Soviet Union with my high school Russian club, backpacking and riding the rails across Europe and the northeast US, and my grand and half-cocked journey to Los Angeles after college to explore the TV and Film business there.

Later as a parent I have continued the tradition by encouraging my kids in their early imagination play at home, and later on their own adventures developing and participating in online fantasy role-playing communities, leading and participating in various Unitarian-Universalist youth community camps, conferences and other projects, and travelling with their peers on odysseys to various destinations in the US and Canada.

I have found that the metric of a successful adventure is not necessarily a successful conclusion or the absence of complete and utter failure, but the fact that one dreamed big, had the courage to actually try to make it happen, rolled with punches along the way, and had a compelling tale to tell at the end. So my daughter Emma’s adventure of “deaning” (coordinating) a Unitarian-Universalist high school youth summer camp when she was sixteen included several serious rule infractions by campers that seriously disrupted the camp and Emma had to help process and adjudicate. My son Eric’s trip with his peers to the UU national conference in Fort Worth climaxed with his old VW van’s engine catching fire on the return trip forcing them to figure out how to rent a car, a trailer hitch and tow the stricken van back to Los Angeles.

By framing your life as a grand adventure, and proactively building into it a number of smaller more discrete adventures along the way, the goal focuses on development, including skills, scope of vision and wisdom. Successful projects are certainly the intention, but failures when they come can be even more valuable as they are likely to push you into uncharted territory where unexpected skills and wisdom are acquired.

Within the context of adventure, achieving happiness or not is a very interesting discussion. Much of my backpacking journey through Europe at age 18 was filled with ordeals and other experiences and not very many happy moments, yet the whole trip was an incredible experience that I would not trade for anything. My dad participated in World War II in Europe as an American soldier. Not a happy experience, but a compelling and developmental one and a key part of the grand adventure that was his life. Yet to live a life without finding any significant amount of happiness can be debilitating and convince you to not even attempt each potential new journey.

There are more very difficult questions here. Can we accept an unhappy journey or tragic life led without being complacently blind to the fact that many people on this planet still lead lives filled with poverty, violence and lack of opportunity? I don’t think we should, and certainly part of the humanist ethic I was raised with and continue to subscribe to is to work for a better life for all. But we all have limits to our power and influence over others and our ability to make things happen in the larger world.

It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I subscribe to the metaphysical idea (not classically humanist) that each human consciousness leads many serial lives. Some of those lives may be tragic while others may be filled with success and happiness, but the bottom line is for them to be developmental and evolve ones consciousness. This is a view I have been exposed to in my adulthood and it fits in well with that vision I inherited from my dad, that life is at best an adventure. This is a context for life that lets me always be filled with hope and a willingness to keep at it, even when things in life don’t turn out as I had hoped.

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