The Adventure Mindset

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” This quote from G.K. Chesterton highlights how our mindset shapes our experience. 

In a recent edition of New Polity, Marc Barnes has some related reflections on adventure. Quoting Pauline Matarasso, he shares, “In a general way, the adventure represents the random, the gratuitous, the unpredictable element in life: often it is the challenge which causes a man to measure himself against standards more than human, to gamble life for honour or both for love.” Marc explains, “Men are so constituted that they can never show themselves noble or brave or good against that which they plan to encounter—if I am polite to my dinner guests, I reveal little. Who knows whether a planned response pairs with what would naturally rise up from my heart? But whether I am polite and kind to the stranger who just shows up, to ‘some guy’ who fetches up on my back porch and asks whether ‘yinz need that unit scrapped’ — now my response shows me forth, gives testimony to my habitual being. Adventure reveals me by taking away the time I might have to craft an action from some source besides my very self, lying so very close to hand.”

I find this a beautiful way of looking at life. Adventure, my encounter with the unexpected, shows me who I am, what I’m really made of. I’ve found it humbling and resourceful to start looking at the inconveniences in my life from this new lens.

This week, I invite you to examine: 

How do I respond to the unexpected? What does my response reveal about me? What would change for me if I viewed the unexpected from the adventure mindset?  

God bless,
Dan