There’s something buried deep within our psyche to avoid pain. Or if we’ve gone through it we quickly block it out (or try) and years later what we recall is a sanitized version of the events minus the pain, the struggle, the adversity, and the emotional and physical exhaustion we may have felt at the time. Obviously when it comes to true trauma … childhood abuse … loss … there is no sanitizing it. It was and is horrific. A broken record that we try to forget or at least attempt to mute.
We have the same inclinations when it comes to many of our so-called adventures, right? Over a cup of coffee with friends in the morning or enjoying beers and pizza at night we each recount stories of epic adventures. If we didn’t know any better (than in our minds) the stories we’re recounting rival that of Frodo in his epic journey in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But the truth is … apart from a few instances it wasn’t all that spectacular.
A few days ago I went on a two hour bike ride on my gravel bike. It was a complete suckfest. It was raining (which does happen a lot in Portland). My legs were already shot from the previous three days of hard riding. Seemingly every direction I turned there was a stiff headwind. Frustratingly so. Twenty minutes into the ride I was already ready to be done. Counting down the minutes until I was sipping coffee back at home reading the latest edition of Freehub Magazine that just arrived in my mailbox. However, a few days removed and I’m like … “Dang, what a great ride! So much fun exploring!” Ah, it wasn’t. My mind is already tricking me.
One year during the 24 Hours of the Old Pueblo it poured … and I mean poured all night. My tent was leaking. I was miserable. My night lap sucked. My headlight decided to die half way through the loop. Dry washes were flowing with frothy milk chocolate colored water. However, years later when I recall the race and my time there I say things like … “It was awesome! What a GRAND adventure!” Truth be told I was covered in mud, my bike was covered in mud, my tent was covered in mud. After the race I didn’t care as I smashed it all into my SUV and headed home. It took days to deep clean and dry everything.
Why do we do that?
I’m a sucker for adventure books. Maybe not the kind you may think of. But I love stories of harrowing journeys, bad decisions, consequences, and the like. But even in these books I detect a romanticized retelling of what happened. No, I’m not saying the adventures didn’t happen. I’m also not crying foul claiming that we’re all making stuff up. At the same time we’ve also truly had epic adventures (worthy of a magazine article) where everything seemed to have aligned. It was the perfect day. The best trip. However, most often they’re not.
In the midst of this I’ve come to see that we also have a lot more adventures than we realize. While most of the time we’re not riding a pristine trail across a knifelike ridge in some exotic location, but we still have a lot of adventures. They just happen to be more mundane … but every bit as meaningful.
What then makes them meaningful? The struggle. Overcoming. Pushing through. It could be as simple as my ride a few days ago or last week when I blew a tire and when I went to put in a new tube I unfortunately realized it had a hole in it as well. I had to call for a ride. Luckily it wasn’t raining. Sure, it was annoying at the time … even frustrating. But looking back? Well, it’s starting to turn into a story to tell. An adventure. Because standing there in the moment I was forced to improvise, adapt, problem solve, and more.
Adventure is all around us. It has everyday possibilities. We cannot wait or assume that true adventure only takes place when we’re riding on some exposed precipice where one pedal strike on that rock we didn’t see sends us tumbling down hundreds … thousands of feet. Instead, adventure is in our backyards. In the moment will we see them as such … adventures? No. However, a week later then all of a sudden it begins moving slowly towards that adventure category. Give it a month … a year … and it was an epic adventure.
It’s the same thing I did when I gashed my leg open mountain biking. In the moment it was unnerving. The deep and long gash, the relentless bleeding, and I still needed to bike another mile back to the trailhead. I didn’t enjoy it, nor the urgent care visit, stitches, etc. But today? It might as well have been a story of an attempted Everest summit. The point is life is truly an exciting adventure. There is beauty in the mundane, the normal, and the everyday. We cannot be beholden to only those times and moments where we can jet set to places far off. Instead, there is adventure to be had … right here … right now.
“‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.'” – Frodo quoting Bilbo, The Fellowship of the Ring
Words and Photo by Sean Benesh
Founder of Loam Coffee