With finances so tight for so many people, it is easy to feel like there is nothing new in life. It is easy to be overcome by the idea that hardship is the only option. It may become necessary for people to begin to examine how they see life, rather than how they experience the realities of day to day living in order to fight back against these tough times.
How to Have an Adventure
One does not need a trip to Africa to escape the pressures of day to day life. People can achieve great things by making their own adventures. Adventures by their nature are not only novel or exciting, although they can be. Sometimes adventures can exist in how one looks at an experience or how one experiences a situation. In paying attention to how one experiences something, suddenly all that is old and taken for granted can be experienced as new.
A day in the park or a summer picnic sounds like just another activity until people think about how they look at it. What do they see on this adventure? While it may be true that they are seeing the same grass and trees they have seen before, it is also possible to observe them and see them in another way. One can look for how the shadows fall or watch a young child experience the feel of grass under his or her feet. One can stand under the tree and look up at the sun and witness the sun’s diffused light maybe for the first time.
Seeking and Finding
The point is that one must seek his own adventures within the circumstances of his own life. The act of seeking is just that, an action of choice that one must make. People choose to find the adventure in what they experience. They can choose to see the underside, the other side, the newer side of all that they have seen before as long as they go into it expecting to see something new.
Even moving mindfully through a day, aware of each thing done or experienced can be an adventure for those who often hurry through each day. Many folks move through life trying to get through their “ to do” list and back to bed in order to do it all again another day. Sometimes even doing the ordinary mindfully can make that ordinary, extraordinary.
In times of bleak news and even bleaker forecasts mindfully seeking adventure in even the most ordinary thing can relieve stress, lessen depression and give people a break from the everyday worries that consume them.