Answering the Call or The Benefits of Running Your Mouth

“The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with the competence and courage the danger fades.” Joseph Campbell, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”

How did I get myself into this? I like to ponder questions like these, letting them playfully swirl around my mind like the dark water lazily eddying behind a boulder in a cold freestone river. My mind is particularly peaked in this matter when I hear stories about people, who by any number of causes (mean and sublime) have found themselves in a difficult/ trying/ ridiculous/ adventurous/ precarious situation; say, on the saddle of a 10,000 foot mountain in a whiteout blizzard with friends who have on little more than blue jeans and cotton sweatshirts or perhaps in the middle of the two mile wide Mississippi River floating helplessly in a canoe towards an oncoming 200 ton freight barge. In each story there seems to be a moment, say less than a minute where the protagonist, in the  midst of the maelstrom, is given respite, sanctuary from all that is chaotic and gains the detached wherewithal to acknowledge their place in space and time on a grander scale. I get lost in the incongruous absurdity of those moments- the chaos vs. the tranquil; that single short span of existence when time coagulates into a thick gooey mass and then briefly solidifies allowing for, even in the midst of the entropy of normality, the gift of clarity; the chance to temporarily transcend the immediate reality and with open eyes, take in all that is happening.

Whoa, but what I find even more interesting is that first question- how did I get myself into this?

Some people will say “it was my calling” to do these things- as in “it was my calling to climb mountains, to sail deep water, to enter ice cream eating contests”...and I bow to such self aware individuals who have heard to call and are following it. To respond to such supernatural voices drives many to the extrema, the poles of ability, to approach our own event horizon and to go beyond the boundary of the known world and take that first tenuous step into the otherness. That lucidity of self awareness is great if you have it, but luckily for the rest of us there are other ways of enticing the spirit of adventure.

As I have found repeatedly in life, there is a tried and true way of beckoning adventure instead of idly waiting for adventure to call you, and fortunately it requires much less mystic self-awareness than it takes “to hear the call to adventure” and instead relies more on your ability to speak or act without thinking-that is to blunder. I like the verb to blunder, it is underrated as a life plan in these hyper scheduled times; after all, if you don't plan, nothing can go wrong, right? As Joseph Campbell says “A blunder-apparently the merest chance- reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into relationship with forces that are not rightly understood...[blunders] are ripples on the surface of life...and these may be very deep, deep as the soul itself...the blunder may amount to the opening of destiny.”

My preferred mode of blunder is to run my mouth, usually with one hand cooled by an icy beverage and the other with index finger extended to aid in proving my seriousness (for some reason this usually happens between the hours of midnight and two in the morning). It was this technique that propelled me to attempt and rightfully claim the record at an international ice cream eating contest and, more recently, to commit to a winter trek across the Boundary Waters. The hard thing is recognizing the moment when you just have to let go and embrace a life that seems outlandish. 

Another short cut to adventure: instead of opting for the “let go and embrace” method just stated (which can go awry without the proper self discipline), I prefer the back-yourself-into-a-corner approach to living life because it (assuming you are person of integrity who values keeping their word) prevents you from flippantly dismissing the call to adventure, which on the good-bad scale is bad; the gods of adventure don't take kindly to being ignored. Another benefit to running your mouth: it will forever slew the tri-headed beast of apathy, ennui and malaise that torments so many poor souls these days. I can't tell you how many times I told people about this idea to “walk from the end of the road (the Gunflint Trail) and go right into downtown Ely in the heart of the winter” but it reached a frequency that required either total commitment to seeing the idea through or else compulsory reclusion from society (or at least from your friends who heard you boast such outlandish claims).

So go out for the night, maybe get a few ideas in your head before you go so you have some options in case the first one falls flat and fails to raise an eyebrow or fails to bait your company into taking interest in your plan or in case your idea has already been logged into the history books of humanity (not that that is an immediate disqualifier, only that you should rethink some of your plan's details to ensure a high degree of originality). Don't be dismayed by naysayers, remember you have a plan and you're not looking for others' approval, only their interest to fully back yourself into a corner. At times like this it is helpful to your cause to be able to offer up some other information or a juicy detail of said idea, like you're not only going to walk from New York to L.A., you're going to do so in the buff or without stopping or by eating only banana Laffy Taffy- you know, something to sell the deal. And remember, you are doing this for you, of course you like sharing stories with friends, but the ultimate goal is to give you that iron clad excuse to get out and do something crazy.

I recommend starting small, say maybe by claiming you could read all the books in the children's department at your local library in a month or that you are going to try all 30 of the micro beers on tap at the bar, in one night (remember, the larger the audience that hears such claims the greater to motivation to complete the challenge, so talk loudly). Then work up to something like a major trail hike, the AT or the PCT, canoeing across lake Superior or drinking a shot of each liquor behind the bar, in one night. Be careful though, blundering into adventures can take on an addictive and compounding nature; after all, no one including yourself will get excited about your new idea if it is somehow less than your last one. This situation, like runaway evolution, can take on a shocking autonomy, where each claim that is made has to be exponentially greater than the last, and the next thing you know you'll be in the middle of a howlin' storm in the Pacific in a small sailboat, wind and water becoming one tumultuous squalling wall of white, up and down losing meaning, one hand clasped to the wheel (sailboats have wheels right?) and the other clutching the hat your new friends in Australia gave you for luck that night in the Barrier Reef bar in Sydney when you, around bar time, proclaimed that you were going to go out the next morning, buy a boat and sail to Green Bay for the Packer's home opener in the fall. At least now, as you're standing there getting pelted by rain and gritting your teeth at the wind, in that brief moment of clarity, you don't have to wonder “how did I get myself into this?”- consider yourself warned.