#3 The Call to Adventure

Many of us are Shreks. We love our cozy little lives, gathering snails and being left alone to exist as the plain and the simple. What is adventure to someone like that? It’s a curse, a no-no word! To a homebody, adventure is another way of being robbed of the lifestyle you hold dear. But if you over-chase something you love, you may wind up wrecking everything you hold dear as you are consumed by obsession. You’ll overcorrect and chase it to an unhealthy extreme. I believe this home-wrecking is one of the ways we wind up needing to go on an adventure. 

But a love doesn’t become an obsession by itself. Something we enjoy becomes a problem when we block something else out. It’s different for each of us, but we all have a specific something that we can’t help but build our “keep out” signs for. For some, it’s change. For others, isolation. Maybe for others, it’s companionship. The list is endless, but we all have one. And when we combine a love with a hate, we get a magical potion that sends us down a path of destruction faster than you can shout “DRAGON!” And the only way out is to adventure into the very thing that we wanted to push away. In doing so, we wind up coming to terms with it and finding ourselves in a far more balanced place.

But you might be thinking “Sir Endar, you’re talking about a work of fiction. This has nothing to do with real life!” Well, I would beg to differ because this was the story of my own life. I let my obsessive need for friendship, higher income and stability steer me away from the path I was on. I spiraled down a trail of turning the things I loved into obsessions. And the thing about obsession is that it always sucks the joy out of those things you once loved. No obsession yields anything but diminishing results and that’s a fact!

And who of us doesn’t have things they love? The only man who doesn’t have hopes, dreams and preferences in this life is the liar. It’s only natural that we lean towards certain things over others, to have places we want to go and places we’d rather not. That’s a normal part of living. The problem arises when we lean heavily into one thing and reject its opposite. And it’s often this tilting that begins our story. We become clingy with our partner and get dumped, we leave the career we love because something else is safer and more secure. The specific thing will change from person to person, but it’s all the same: a love became an obsession and now we’re out of balance. 

And it is to restore this balance that calls us to adventure. Sure, it might look like it was this, that, or the other that forced us to change something, but there’s an inner peace that can’t be found until we go on our adventure. It’s a restless stirring in the soul that begins our journey. And until we resolve whatever is rotting in our chests, we will continue the adventure in one way or another. Something else will come up, the friend group will feel like the wrong one, or your job will be the wrong choice. A lingering sense that something is “off” will follow you everywhere. 

But what does this look like? What am I actually talking about in terms of our everyday lives? Let me tell you my story as an example. I have never been the adventurous type. I’m drawn to the example of Shrek because that was me in a way. No, I didn’t get fat, wallow in the mud and walk around burping and farting all day. But if there was something to do that involved leaving the house growing up, my answer was always a very firm “no.” Sometimes I didn’t feel like putting up a fight, so I would offer a “maybe,” and hope the person that asked simply wouldn’t come back. Either way, I may as well have had a wall of “go away” signs posted around me with how strongly I felt about it. 

Needless to say, I was the least adventurous person around. But as I was wrapping up college, I realized that I had a passion for heavier, physical work. And if you know anything about physical labor jobs, they aren’t exactly the safest, most predictable places to be. I learned to roll with some of the punches, but I didn’t have my precious, perfect life under my complete control, so I eventually wound up migrating to the infamous desk job. 

I did this for a while, and on the surface it looked like I had made it. Most of my day was perfectly predictable. We had a few fixes to try and if they didn’t work, we would just ship replacement products and call it a day. It was easy and simple. No stress, no mess. On top of that, I got to work with my buddies, which felt like a little cherry on top. But this was on top of the 8-10 hours I spent with them over the weekend. My obsession with friendship brought me to a point where I was spending almost fifty hours a week with these guys. It was nuts!And remember what I said earlier? An obsession always has diminishing returns. When your obsession has brought you to a point like mine, you’re bound to run into problems. To make a long story short, the friend group ran into conflict and I eventually split off. And as far as the job goes, I started burning out because I had no desire to actually do the work set before me. The love of friendship, security and predictability became my downfall because I was running from their counterparts.

There was a rot spreading in me. A rot always comes from something we want to cling too tightly to because of something that we want to reject. Often we reject something because of how we were raised, but it could come from a number of things. It may take some different circumstances to spark things up, but we all have a thing or two rotting within us. And once we discover them, the rot builds pressure until we are eventually shot like cannonballs into the arms of adventure. We go to far-off places and do new and dangerous things in order to cure our rot. Eventually we figure out what went wrong, and we begin the journey home. We settle into our lives as we now know them, fixated on the things that we love and the peace we have found. 

This is where adventure begins. We are called to swing the pendulum to the other side of our imbalanced lives to discover why we went so astray. Where we were in our balance might actually have been close to where we ought to be. We may actually be swamp-ogres at heart, and meant to remain as such. But if we insist on obsessing over the things we want to have, our swamp will become our prison and eventually our tomb. Instead, we must heed the call to adventure to embrace everything we rejected. The goal might wind up being to return to the swamp, but to do so with acceptance of the world outside of it. To come back as one who enjoys what always did without pushing the rest of the world out. 

So ask yourself: are there things you reject outright? Maybe you’re like me, and refuse to travel. Maybe you refuse to go to parties or to try dating again. It could be anything, but look for those things that you feel strongly about pushing out of your life. I pray you find the start of your grand adventure, and that you find your way to your swamp, filled with inner peace, a glowing smile, and maybe an occasional weedrat dinner!

Until next time

May peace be your guide.