Man is a questing species.
Go to a scorching desert—You will find our fellow
humans there.
Go above the Arctic Circle—More Brethren.
Go to a punishingly humid and dense mosquito filled
rain forest, formerly “jungle—There we are.
Look to wind-whipped oxygen-depleted mountains—Again.
Look to the seas—There we are yet again.
Look above your heads—Human filled aircraft and the International
Space Station [ISS] sail there.
We are found in all these unforgiving environments.
There is such a spirit of intrepidity at the root of
this species, a desire to go where the environment provides no quarter
to our ambition.
It should conjure jaw-dropping amazement and perhaps a
dint of pride.
Pride—There’s
a word to be used carefully.
Despite the moral hustings of “The Seven Deadly
Sins” tale we are right to feel pride in our accomplishments. Pride
is the emotional dessert after cleaning your plate and doing your chores aspect
of a given task.
The word pride, strictly [and wisely] used is for our own
achievements. Not that of others. Pride is a word for the self, not something to
share and hitch yourself to when another is right to feel pride.
For example, my daughter is a disciplined and accomplished
singer, songwriter musician. I can be [and am] greatly impressed by her accomplishments.
She can be proud of them. I cannot
be proud, as I had nothing to do with them.
Some say, “But you are her father and had a hand in
creating her.”
Sure, there’s that. Pleased to have done so, but to
hitch my Pride Wagon to any and all Good Deed or impressive work of another
seems a cheap and cheating way to garner self-esteem.
I’ll settle for being deeply and duly impressed by her
and get to work earning my own pride.
To my way of thinking, “pride in other’s” accomplishments
let’s us off of the “go-getter” hook a wee bit.
Back to the sentence that got us here:
It should conjure jaw-dropping amazement
and perhaps a dint of pride.
While we may not be, ourselves, the folks who crossed
the Bering Strait, shivered at the Pole alongside Amundsen, trudged along with
Lewis & Clark’s Corps of Discovery, we are the ancestors of such folk.
Which means, unless these folks were demigods or genetic
outliers [they weren’t] then we all have a bit of that venturesome “can do”
within us.
A burning curiosity.
A desire for “What’s over that hill?”
So, if we are all made of that “Right Stuff,” what
happened to most of us?
Modern Problem # 1 “Assuming
Lack of Horizons”
The thing is, to many minds, all the hills have been
looked over, or the geographic locations that once were uncharted territories
now have malls or suburbs on them.
No matter where you live, no matter where you stand or
sit, right now, right this second—that spot was once a brand-new unknown to one
of our ancestors.
Your current location was virgin territory rife for
exploration.
So, with nothing left to fulfill that burning curiosity
in our breasts, that exploratory jones in our souls, we scour the web as diligently
as the Scout on the Oregon Trail that looks for the flattened grass or other “sign”
that “trouble may be up ahead.”
We browse store shelves with the same assiduity of a
hunter-gatherer in the bush who sought to ensure a good meal for survival.
We plan vacations for the simple reason that “there
is not here.”
We all possess this exact same kernel of exploratory intrepidity
that our ‘betters’ possessed.
Modern Problem #1 is simply that, by assuming that “All
has been discovered” we have turned our remarkable adventurous sprits, our astoundingly
inquisitive minds to trivial pursuits.
That spirit persists but the outlet for it has stakes
so low that several hours of fruitful web surfing never feels quite as accommodating
as that one brief hike when you found an actual arrowhead or came upon a
thicket of succulently ripe blackberries.
Modern Problem #2: Adventure
By Proxy
We will “hunt,” “pursue,” “venture,” and even “kill” hour
upon hour in videogames.
We will laugh, cry, and get all goose-pimply during the
“shared hunts” of film/television portrayals of others adventuring for us.
We will root, cheer, “Huzzah!” like pageboys at a Medieval
jousting tournament from the sofa or stool of our favorite sprots bar as “our”
team does its own version of jousting.
Our enthusiasm is no less than the pageboy’s but there
the similarity ends.
The pageboy is there not only for the spectacle but to
sponge sweat from humid armor between bouts, adjust the steed’s cinches, keep
the flagon filled.
Likely, our pageboy also has eyes on participating
even more in-depth himself someday, perhaps on horseback.
The pageboy’s “Huzzahs!” are as loud as our own, but
they are infused with a participatory fiery fuel that mere jersey-wearing, bumper-sticker
sticking, and slogan shouting cannot match.
A rousing evening of observing your favorite athletic endeavor
likely will never be as deeply satisfying as any conjured memory of a summer’s
evening playing some subpar version of that same sport when you were a kid.
To misuse Shakespeare, “The play’s the thing.”
Modern Problem #3 “Some Day,
Over There”
Tourist packages offer many grand vacation destinations.
These are often sweetened by a menu of activities one
can add to the itinerary.
·
Hike to the ruins? Hell, yeah!
·
Sample unusual cuisines? Sign me up!
Once again, vacation destinations
and the offered activities are proof that the ancestor’s adventurous soul persists
within us.
The assumption that a tour-operator
or “vacation-representative” are required is the root of the third problem.
I hate to be this guy,
but I'm going to provide an un-referenced quote. I heard a modern-day explorer interviewed
on a National Geographic program a few years back. After the interviewer
reels off a staggering list of travel destinations and feats of derring-do
our unnamed explorer had braved, the interviewer asks:
"Why do you seek
out and have so many adventures?”
To which the unnamed
adventurer fires back:
"Why aren't you
having more?"
The answer is often, we
assume too much.
That is, our mind’s availability
bias, helped along a bit by marketing sees “desired” locations as being necessarily
distant and exotic.
Our same unnamed explorer
reports of a cab ride in which the cab driver upon learning of his passenger’s
many adventures says, “Man, I’d really like to have some adventures like you.”
The intrepid passenger noticing
a mountain from the back window asks, “What’s the view like up there?”
Our cab-driver replies, “Dunno,
never been up there.”
And that is Modern
Problem #3 in a nutshell.
We may indeed honestly think
to ourselves, “If circumstances were different,” or “Someday I’ll get
out there and…”
Back to our vacation menu
options.
Snorkel the reef?
·
Got a body of water near you? When’s the
last time you’ve been to it?
Hike to the ruins?
·
Got an old town or abandoned building near
you? You can start there. Using web resources as a locator I’ve visited 4 abandoned
towns all within a 45-minute drive—way closer than Machu Picchu.
Sample unusual cuisines?
·
How many offbeat restaurants, food trucks,
holes in the wall have you tried in your area? Or closer to home, as in right in
your home, how many unusual recipes do you concoct?
In other words, turn “Some Day, Over There” to “Monday,
right here.”
Modern Problem #4 Assumption
of Experience
This one is a correlate of Problem #2 “Adventure By
Proxy.”
I, as have many of you, have had this experience
often.
“We went whitewater rafting this weekend, it was
awesome!”
“Yeah, I’ve watched videos of it on
YouTube.”
Huh?
A video, a photo, a written account is never the thing
itself.
We all know that.
Watching Alex Honnold free climb Yosemite’s El Capitan is not in any way shape or form one foot off of the ground of his adventure.
Saying, “Yeah, I saw that documentary of him called
Free Solo” is not even slipping a toe into a climbing shoe.
“I saw a video on YouTube” is never [never] a correlate,
a substitution, or even close to an adequate stand-in for the most basic experience
being depicted.
Videos, images, and accounts are meant to inspire to action.
When one says, “I had the most amazing sex last
night,” no one is ready with the reply, “Yeah, me too, I watched porn
last night,” as if both are now talking of similar carnal experiences.
Videos of whitewater rafting are like those of porn—they
are meant to inspire to action.
Porn that does not inspire action is not
good porn.
Feel free to push that analogy to your own taste
limits.
The doing is the thing. The being there is the thing.
In 1953, Jacques Cousteau and his companion Dumas descended
to an unprecedented 4,000 feet beneath the ocean in a bathysphere.
When a reporter asked why they simply didn’t take
photos instead of going themselves, Dumas replied,
“After all, the eye is closer to the brain than the
lens. The eye knows how to select.”
Modern Problem #5 Assumption
of Permission
Often the why we don’t is more a vague assumption that
exploration and adventuring in all its scalable forms is not available to
Y-O-U.
We seem to have an odd feeling that we need an opportunity
to present itself, when opportunities actually abound.
We simply stop seeing the opportunities and close
ourselves off to them, walling in this heritage of exploration, adventure and never-ending
curiosity.
French aviator Antoine de Saint Exupery expressed this dilemma in his 1939 paean to adventurous
flying Wind,
Sand and Stars.
He was on the way to an
airfield to fly a plane solo in storm conditions. As he rode the bus in he looked
around him at the other passengers. His eyes settled on, well, a man who could
easily be any of us.
“Old bureaucrat, my
comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You,
like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and
cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball
in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial
life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars.
You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to
forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and
do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty
bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still
time. Now the clay of you which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and
naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer
that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”
Solutions
to the Five Modern “Problems”
Modern Problem # 1 “Assuming Lack of
Horizons”
Start now, right where you
are.
Sure, someone may have climbed
that hill over there, hell, many thousands of times, but I know one person who’s
never seen the view from up there.
Modern Problem #2: Adventure By Proxy
Don’t give your adventures
away. Don’t settle for someone else’s fun.
Would you be happy having someone
else sleep with your partner while you merely cheered them on? [Well, some are
into that, but you get my drift.]
Modern Problem #3 “Some Day, Over There”
Mark, I’m with
you, and I am definitely gonna do something about this. Why as a matter of
fact, I’ve got plans to…”
Let me stop you right there
and turn this over to Epictetus.
The Stoic philosopher, offered
this retort to a student who professed grand plans of learning and moral deeds
he was planning on starting the next day, "So, tomorrow you shall be
a good man, what does that make you today?"
Ouch!
If we applied this
logic to all grand plans in our lives we can see that un-stated opposite in
each pronouncement we make: "Tomorrow I'll start that diet, today I
shall be fat." ""I'll train hard starting tomorrow, today I am
lazy." "Tomorrow I'm going to start reading more, today I am
content with my current level of ignorance."
If we want more, more of
anything we must pay for it--sometimes with money, but always with time
and always with attention. So, what are we all paying for right now,
investing in with our time and attention?
Modern Problem #4 Assumption of Experience
So, we gonna settle for
photos, videos, and posts like these?
Make your own adventures, or
as the analogy says, make your own porn.
Maybe its clumsy, maybe its
poorly lit but at least it stars Y-O-U and no one can take that payday from you.
Modern Problem #5 Assumption of Permission
You don’t need permission.
But, if you think you do—Go!
You have my blessing!
Now get out there, have some
fun.
Tear it up a little.
You, I’m talking to Y-O-U,
come from a species of astounding go-getters.
Well, go get’em!
[For a little old school how-to
on a few adventures check out this blog where you’ll find such accumulated
wisdom from old school sources here and there.
And for those looking for
actual hands-on physical training in old school combat, well, see here
http://www.exxtremeselfprotection.com
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