Here’s the Thing about Adventures

Here’s the thing about adventures: they’re risky. A lot of people never even set out on them to begin with because it’s just too much uncertainty, too many potential hazards.

I started calling this blog XpatAdventures when the nature of the adventure was shaped mostly by living alone in a foreign country. Now I realize that’s just part of this Adventure… the larger context is the Adventure of being a woman alive in the 21rst century, a woman born in a place and time when, for the first time in human history, I have freedom, autonomy, literacy, education, my own financial means. I can do ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING on the entire planet. That’s a lot of choices.

And it’s completely uncharted territory, full of risk, hazards, unknowns.

The thing about an Adventure of this magnitude is unexpected things are guaranteed — some wonderful, some terrifying, some heartbreaking… the only thing you can be sure of is they’ll keep happening until they stop and then the Adventure will be over.

My own Adventure — as an expat and a woman — has been full of unmarked and unexpected hazards lately. The really big, tough, scary kinds of hazards that make you question yourself and think, “Whose idea was this Adventure, anyway?” and “Maybe I should have just stayed home…” So I haven’t been writing much. I might have just typed, “BEYOND HERE THERE BE DRAGONS.”

Then today I ran across this video. I prefer Elizabeth Gilbert’s speaking to her writing, and this may be my favorite speech yet. She recalls Proust said,

“Our lives are journeys that nobody can take for us and nobody can spare us from. We have to do it on our own.”

She says, “We have to figure out our own paths and it’s tricky because there are so many choices.” and “We [women] are all on the front line.” What she means is,  we don’t have role models and narratives to follow as we blaze our trails and live our own Adventures. “I look at all my friends,” she adds, “and it’s like we’re kind-of baffled about what we’re supposed to do with ourselves.”

The truth is, blog readers, I’m not sure anymore how much to tell you about my own Perilous Adventure because it doesn’t read like any story I thought would be my life. I have long since left the map I thought my life would be charted on. In fact, it looked a little like the US board game, LIFE, which was surely based on the 1950s/1960s US tv series Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best, and that’s about as far from my life’s story as you can get. So baffled, befuddled… those are pretty good words to describe the journey when I compare it against those old scripts.

“Our lives don’t look like the women who came before us and they don’t look like the women next to us. We’re all on our own journey here.”

“If we are to move forward we will be taking enormous risks and we will be failing and we will be disappointing ourselves.. ..We will fall on our faces, we will get up, we will brush off ourselves and we will continue.”

That’s where the Adventure’s taken me lately — down an unexpected fork in the river and into Class IV-V rapids. (Those are pretty big.)  Here’s the video of her whole speech… it’s about 21 minutes long and worth it. Enjoy!

Liz Gilbert at O!