Imagining Adventure

I drove past the sign and as the car was moving faster, I started feeling less restless. I had just stopped by the petrol station, I had a full tank and enough money in my purse to refuel once more. Things had definitely been worse for me at some point in the past, but I didn’t want to think about that. I left the town behind and I could just keep driving… But where?

Some people get antsy when spring arrives, it’s like the warm air defrosts their adventurous side; others get edgy when autumn or winter start imbuing the air with their specific fragrance. For me, it’s summer, early summer. It’s always been early summer. That’s the time of year when I become particularly restless… some might smirk and call that restlessness careless or even self-destructive. I couldn’t argue with them, it’s been known to happen…

This is the time when I feel a desperate need to shake everything up, to uproot my entire existence. This is the time when I fantasize about change, about complete change that I cause voluntarily by simply turning everything upside down and starting fresh. Am I still able to do that, I wonder? I don’t know anymore, but every early summer I feel like putting myself to that particular test. As I drive past the city limits, I can’t deny the urge to never come back. Perhaps I’ve lived here long. Perhaps I’ve gotten all there was to get out of this place. Perhaps it’s time for somewhere else, for something else. Perhaps it’s time to pull everything down so I could rebuild something entirely new.

While I’m still in town, I try to distract myself by focusing on the small things. Maybe I could focus this energy on adding something new rather than on starting new. I drive past a cyclist and I think, I could do that too, he seems to enjoy it. Yes, I could do that, but I hate cycling, I always have; that’s no fun for me. I want something else, something more adventurous, more thrilling. Mountain climbing perhaps? I’m not the mountain climbing type either. I’ve tried it many moons ago, I ticked it off the list and then got over it. I can’t say I hated it, but it didn’t suit me either. Once I proved myself I could do it, I moved on. None of those things are me, I crave some sort of adventure, not a reinvention of myself.

I know how to handle this sort of craving after all the times I’ve experienced it. I also know I’m not a pleasant person to be around when this sort of mood hits, so I try to stay away from those I care about. The truth is, the main reason why my adventure fantasies remain just that and I prevent them from materializing is the fact that nowadays I have something to lose. The truth is I don’t hate my life; I actually am aware of all the things I have to be grateful for… The truth is I also have people I care about, people I wouldn’t want to lose. Yet these restless thoughts I get every early summer make me envision and crave just that – a brand new existence, with brand new challenges, because it seems it’s in our blood to get bored, to stop appreciating, to take things and people for granted.

Driving back on a more scenic route, the way I always knew I would, I feel a bit calmer. I always know when I want to leave a place or a person for good and I generally manage to focus on the reasons I have to go back. But imagining how it might be to escape my own existence and build a new one is still something thrilling, something motivating, something I ultimately and selfishly don’t want to share with anybody else. It’s my adventure, after all.

However, there are pertinent compromise versions of it – I hear that’s what adults do… Hmmm… I know that part of my restlessness is the fact that I miss travelling. After a year of going back and forth almost on a monthly basis, after practically living in two countries at once, now I realize I miss it. In spite of all the difficulties, I grew to like it… or at least to get used to it so much and so fast, that apparently now I miss it, on top of everything else. So I know that some small travel adventure – be it locally or internationally – is a compromise I could very well live with and enjoy enough to calm down these early summer urges. There’s the adventure we dream about and then there’s the adventure we can afford to live with in real life…

I’m often told that people “my age” settle down and should be perfectly fine with living uneventful lives; and if I crave adventure, I should just spend a day on the beach without solar protection. Well, call me crazy, label me hopelessly immature, but once in a while I need more than that. And as long as I can offer myself at least a part of that which I want and need, I will do just that, regardless of the frowns it might bring on certain brows… who, I might add, have no business minding my business.

In response to WordPress Weekly Discover Challenge – Adventure.