100 Day Creative Challenge: Day 32
Appointments For Adventure
New Year is traditionally a time when we reflect on the previous year and make resolutions or plans for the next. As a writer, I imagine the New Year as a blank page, one to be filled with potential stories, ideas and characters which will form into a new work.
We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.
Ellen Goodman
It’s not that hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What is hard is deciding what you’re willing to give up, or invest in, in order to do the things you really care about. The everyday choices we make change our lives.
Every January First I get my year planner out and make appointments for adventure. Once a month my husband and I cross something off The List. The List is our never-ending bucket list. We began this journey a few years ago and it has transformed our lives.
Rather than waiting until we retire or win a lottery or have some life-threatening disease, we deliberately began filling in our planner with adventures.
That highlights of that first year included:
- Travelling to central Australia and visiting Uluru and Kings Canyon.
- Hiking and swimming thorough the gorges at Karijini.
- Quad biking across salt lakes in the West Australian Goldfields and having a bonfire BBQ.
- Visiting Cambodia for volunteer work three times.
- A six-hour snowshoe hike through the Snowy Mountains and getting caught in a blizzard.
- Snorkelling along Ningaloo Reef and visiting dolphins at Monkey Mia.
- Hiking through rainforest in far-north Queensland.
- Having a picnic on an uninhabited sand cay in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef.
- Visited the homes of our sponsor children in Phnom Penh and eating with a local family in a traditional village in Cambodia.
That was six years ago and every year since then has been just as amazing.
We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day. Edith Lovejoy Pierce
2016 has a few possibilities lined up already: A European trip, running my first writer’s retreats, speaking opportunities, new books to release and so, so much more, however, adventures are much more than travel. Family events such as weddings and graduations and holidays and dinners and gatherings of all kinds are adventures too.
Adventures are about learning to enjoy life, not always knowing what the outcome will be.
If we don’t plan it, it doesn’t always happen. The phrase Appointments for Adventure reads like an oxymoron. Aren’t adventures serendipitous?
I find that planning means we actually do something, and when we do something different, the unexpected happens.
New Year’s Day is a day of possibility for us. We see the blank wall planner and imagine all the adventures we’ll have. New Year’s Day is more exciting than any party we might go to on New Year’s Eve because we love making appointments for adventure.
Why not give it a try?
