#104: I believe in Adventure
After having my ID rejected at the Serbian border this summer, it was time to get a new passport. Ah, adventures!
Happy Friday!
This week I believe in Adventure
Ask me how I'll remember 2018 and I won't say 'typing words into a computer', even though that's how I spent far too much of almost every single day.
Not all of that typing was unmemorable, of course. Writing the second series of Foiled was fabulous and I'm sure I'll be writing about how I believe in creativity soon.
(Aside: Beth and the lads were at the BBC today to pitch for a third series. Cross fingers!)
But these are the memories that stand out most in my mind from this past year:
Bothying in the snow-bound Cairngorms
Travelling around Greece, meeting with refugees
Cycling 1000 miles with Thighs of Steel
Hiking in the Brecon Beacons
In a word: adventures.
Adventure is a big word, of course. But the choice is deliberate.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, adventure is:
A course of action which invites risk
A perilous or audacious undertaking the outcome of which is unknown
A daring feat or exploit
A remarkable or unexpected event, or series of events, in which a person participates as a result of chance
A novel or exciting experience
Personally, I like the roguish simplicity of this definition: A wild and exciting undertaking (not necessarily lawful).
But who defines risk, peril, audacity, daring, expectation, novelty and excitement? We do. Adventure is relative and I'm claiming it for myself.
The events that are most memorable from my year are the adventures, those moments when I made an audacious move to go beyond the limits of my comfort, surrendered to novelty, and invited risk and chance.
But there is nothing in any of those definitions that limits moments of adventure to epic bike tours through foreign lands, climbing mountains and sleeping in cold huts.
So this year's adventures also include meeting my new niece, a family reunion, applying for a job, learning how to throw a Frisbee, talking to people in saunas, breathing deeply, running another half marathon and kissing in the back of a taxi.
Audacity, daring, novelty and wild excitement are opportunities we can dig up anywhere, at any moment. At any moment, we can stretch out our lives like vellum and print them with memories of adventure.
Do you not feel like you live an adventurous life? Are you sure? Don't you ever feel challenged? Don't you ever worry that things won't turn out, and thrill when they do? Don't you ever see things you've never seen before, or talk to unexpected strangers?
Well, go on then, here, take this word - adventure!
Adventure isn't only for polar explorers and hitmen. We can have it for ourselves.
Further Adventures
Professional adventurer Alastair Humphreys reading Seneca Letter 28: On travel as a cure for discontent. A beautiful reading, set to a beautiful video. 'Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.'
The Most Interesting Country in the World: Part 1 (10 minute read) 'At home, our comfort zone is vast, like a great big sofa, sucking us in to watch endless re-runs of Miss Marple, where the Toff murderer always gets his or her comeuppance and order is restored in the form of a pillow-dribble nap.'
What Makes a Person Do a Thing? (12 minute read) 'It seems extraordinary, but we do get scared of our power, we do fear our greatness; we sometimes feel like we don’t deserve such responsibility, or we feel like imposters when we do presume to act.'
FICTION-NON-FICTION
Snippets from my reading.
FICTION
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (1946)
Above the turrets, like a wing ripped from the body of an eagle, a solitary cloud moved northwards through the awakening air quilled with blood.
..
The chef's face had suffered a transformation. All the vast media of his head became, as clay becomes under the hand of the modeller, bent to the externalisation of a passion. Upon it, written in letters of pulp, was spelt the word revenge.
NON-FICTION
Sum: Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman (2009) Not strictly non-fiction, but there are so many scenarios that surely one of them must be right.
For a while we worried about a separation from God, but our fears were eased when the prophets revealed a new understanding: we are God's organs, His eyes and fingers, the means by which He explores His world. We all felt better about this deep sense of connection - we are a part of God's biology.
But it slowly grew clearer that we have less to do with His sensory organs and more to do with His internal organs. The atheists and theists agreed that it is only through us that He lives. When we abandon him, He dies. We felt honoured at first to be the cells that form God's body, but then it became clearer that we are God's cancer.
For those of you curious as to the outcome of last weekend's momentous Gosport Half, I finished in a course personal best time of 1 hour 29 minutes and 59 seconds, in a dead heat with my race manager. It's a result that puts me into the top 5.1% of half marathon runners in the country.
On the down side, I can't now walk.
Thanks for the loan of your eyeballs, and may you have a glorious weekend!
Much love,
- dc
CREDITS
David Charles wrote this newsletter. David is co-writer of BBC Radio sitcom Foiled, and also writes for The Bike Project, Elevate and Thighs of Steel. He can be found at davidcharles.info and on Twitter @dcisbusy
Christian Vieler photographs dogs catching treats. Via Kottke.org.