Memoir Prompt: Adventure

Great memoir prompt! Anndeecandy wrote: "Day 4: Adventure. "This is the story of how Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing things and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours' respect, but he gained--well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end."' 

Want to participate in the Memoir writing? Go to Anndeecandy or type #8minutememoir on Instagram. :)

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I have a strong sense of adventure. Or rather, my brain does. After having careened wildly through the years up until about age 30, my brain finally started slowing down enough for me to become more introspective.. to be able to look inward and and to begin to be PROactive instead of REactive.

My brain has a strong tendency to be sleepy. Since having my youngest child and watching his development, I have associated my brain as having ADD, in the literal sense. Meetings are painful, paperwork is a struggle. My difficulty with schooling through my early years until high school began to make sense. While I crave the structure of a routine and some semblance of schedule (as is proven to me by about mid-July of every summer) I find that without some adventure to plot, I sleepwalk through my life.

Give me something novel, particularly an adventure of any kind, and my brain comes gloriously alive! It is at these times that I believe I am my best self, although I can also move into hyper focusing and then drive myself and others around me to tears. :)

Most recently, my sense of adventure was satiated with a six week long summer trip that I took with my two sons. Nearly two years in the planning, it gave me something fun to obsess over and obsess I did! There was so much to read about and plan! Lodging to be rented, activities to be booked, routes to plan. Everywhere that I go, I like to plan things to be as "local" as possible, so we try to stay in neighborhoods or Mom and Pop joints, and we like to find hole-in-the-wall places to eat that the locals enjoy. We also try hard to eat what is special to that place or region. 

We also jumped off the cliff into physical adventure! Nine national parks and many state parks. Rappelling, Canyoneering, Hiking Bungee swinging over a gorge, Ziplining, Extreme 4x4 Rock Crawling and more. It took me a year, the loss of 65 pounds and some major training to prepare my body, but I did it. It was the "Summer of Yes," as in YES we can do that and YES I can and YES to every picture in every place possible.  And now, looking back a year later, YES all those things were accomplished and I don't regret a single minute or a single penny spent.

Oddly, that adventure was both so exhausting and so fulfilling that my sense of adventure, maybe for the first time in my life, has been somewhat satiated. I don't have the craving that I have felt all my life, deep in my bones, to be somewhere else, on the run, planning the next big thing. The restlessness has been dormant and I have been more of a homebody than I can recall being at any other time in my life.

Still, I am beginning to feel a flickering again. There is so much out there to explore, and so little time in which to do it all! Accents I have yet to hear, foods I have yet to try, sights and sounds and smells and adventures yet to unfold before me. 

Ain't life grand?