Kat
ON THE
Map
Why do people adventure?
I started by asking, "Why is adventure important to you?"
"I learn the most about myself from my adventures."
"It makes life worth living and challenges the way you view the world ."
"It keeps you searching for something unknown."
"Committing yourself to the unknown, It provides color to life, gives you stories, shows you the world, and tells you what you're capable of."
"It keeps me alive!"
"I have a low threshold for boredom."
"Experience-based learning is more meaningful."
"Because I've read about it in too many books. Now it's my turn."
"I consider most things an adventure, and I don't think life would be life without adventure."
And what do adventurers have to teach?
"But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but it was true...Perhaps the impulse to purchase the PCT guidebook months before had been a primal grab for a cure, for the thread of my life that had been severed."
"Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was."
"But I wasn't out here to keep myself from having to say I'm not afraid. I'd come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really--all that I'd done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn't do that while tagging alone with someone else."
"That perhaps being amidst the undesecreated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I'd lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself...Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me."
Wild chronicles her backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail--a grueling 1100 mile treck from Mexico to Canada. After her mom's death from a rapid onset of lung cancer and a losing struggle to keep her marriage together, Cheryl picked up a PCT guidebook in an REI store one day and decided she was going to do it. She had never backpacked before, and she was a woman doing this monster of a hike solo. Scroll over to see some of my favorite quotes about why she did it and why she refused to quit.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
"...at the age of forty-eight, on the verge of divorce, I looked around and thought: There has to be more than one way to do life. There is."
"This person is not wife, mother, daughter, writer, anthropology student, LA sophisticate. She is, of course, all of these things; but alone, without the attachments, she is a woman in limbo whose identity has been buried in her roles. Away from those roles and alone, she is someone she doesn't know."
"I do not ask for permission to live this new life, not from my kids, not from my parents, not from my friends, many of who m are convinced that I'm avoiding the real world...But I'm not running away. I'm running toward...toward adventure, toward discovery, toward diversity...Once I leave the US, I am not bound by the rules of my culture."
"Community is important to me; and my kind of travel does not preclude being a part of a group. In Mexico, it was the backpacker community; in Nicaragua, it was Marco and Don Juana and their family; in Israel, it was Servas. And in Bali, my community is the puri. There is more than one kind of community."
Female Nomad is written by a woman who, at age 48 and the end of her marriage, decided to reject the traditional way of living. She sold her house, her posessions, and took off for a nomadic journey that would take her all over the globe. As a children's book author, she lived off royalties that would have put her well under the poverty line in America but which was more than sustainable elsewhere. Scroll over to see my favorite quotes about how she redefined her identity and the idea of 'community.'
Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman
"Adventure is just a personal thing, I decided, it means whatever you want it to. To me it just means having a go at something that might be exciting or difficult, just to see if I can."
"Just trust your instincts, I told myself, use your wits, this is what it's all about."
"'Y'know what...' he continued, suddenly all thoughtful, 'if you pull something like that off in life, you ain't never gonna worry about any other shit ever again, right?' 'Right!' I assured him."
"I was beginning to realize that these horror-storytellers rarely spoke from personal experience, they just related old, exaggerated cliches and Foreign Office paranoia in an attempt at worldliness--and failed miserably."
Lois on the Loose is about a woman who, tired of the tedium of her office job, quits and takes off on a solo motorcycle trip from the top of Alaska to the tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego. No, it's not fiction. She rode on a bike that people told her wouldn't make it; she went alone when people told her she'd be in too much danger. And she found that if you listen to everybody who tells you, "Don't go" for reasons x, y, and z, you'll never do the things you really want in life. Scroll over to see my favorite quotes about what she learned along the way.
Lois on the Loose by Lois Pryce
Written about the life of Daniel Suelo, Mark Sundeen tells the true story of a man who gave adventure a definition I hadn't yet considered. As the title suggests, Suelo quit using money. While he works regularly at a shelter for abused women and children, he refuses payment, lives in caves in Moab, Utah, and takes only that which is discarded or freely given. The book is the story of how Suelo grappled with his religious beliefs in juxtaposition to a money based society which seemed to contradict most religions basic tenants. Scroll over to read my favorite quotes about Suelo's philosophy and why he chose the path he did.
"His life goal since I met him is to take as little and give as much as possible."
"If we're following our path, then worrying about what could or should happen is a worse illness than what could or should happen. And it's more likely we're going to be out of balance if we worry. The idea is that the future will take care of itself if we remain in the present. I really don't know what I'll do and I don't think about it that much. Some might call that irresponsible. But that's part of the path I'm on."
"His job was nothing more than glorified prostitution. He was paid to be helpful. It wasn't coming from his heart. He was just doing it for money." "There is no honest profession--that's the paradox. The oldest profession [prostitution] is the most honest, for it exposes the bare bones of what civilization is all about. It's the root of all professions."
"This was Suelo's hypothesis: 'Chance is God. To know the mind of Chance you must break all attachments (preplanning) and move with chance. Faith = taking a chance.'"