I just read the book ‘Ask an Adventurer’ by Alastair Humphreys, which was I must say, a very enlightening read. Honest, open, straight forward, and entertaining to boot. I’ve craved adventure for as long as I can remember, and to varying degrees I’ve dabbled in it most of my life. I didn’t achieve the level of risk and madness that I would have loved in my youth, and now, as a family man in my forties, I no longer want that level of intensity, but in my head and my heart I still yearn for the sense of freedom and energy that comes with immersion in nature or a tough challenge.
As I look back on my adventures, I see that they were for the most part, very controlled experiences in relatively safe environments. My teenage dreams of mountain climbing and big wave surfing (based on no real-life experience of either), and other vague ideas of polar or jungle exploration never came to fruition, due to a lack of real determination to make them happen. Evidently, I didn’t want them as badly as I thought I did. I do have regrets sometimes, about not having done more whilst I was younger, but I’m now mostly at peace with my achievements so far.
Reading Alastair’s book, and the stories of others who’ve turned adventure into a lifestyle or career, I can identify with the longing for and enjoyment of the suffering (at least in hindsight), and reveling in new experiences and landscapes. I can even have imagined myself speaking and writing for a living to sustain that lifestyle. Perhaps the years have mellowed me, or maybe we evolve through different stages in life, but now I don’t feel that pull in the same way anymore. Not for the big dangerous stuff anyway, nor for anything that requires me to organise my life around an extreme training plan.
Something else that now plays on my mind to a much greater degree is the environmental impact of such endeavours, and my motivations for wanting to try them. For the most part, it’s exceptionally difficult to mount an expedition that isn’t in some way harmful to the place you’re passing through or the people you encounter, even if the consequences are not immediately obvious. As with my adventure cravings, my environmental concerns have waxed and waned through the years as I dream of becoming self-sufficient whilst still consuming vast quantities of plastic packaging, eating non-organic food, and working in the not-so-environmentally-friendly mass tourism industry.
Wanting to share adventures with my children is also leading me down a different path. I can’t, or don’t want to put them or myself at too much risk, yet I still want to share some enthusiasm for the outdoors and give them a taste of adventure. To use a term that Alastair coined, it’s time to have some ‘micro-adventures’. Camping in the garden, bike rides along the dirt tracks close to home, fishing trips, bird spotting, rock pools, looking for beetles and lizards under rocks, walking up hills, swimming in the sea. For the little ones, it´s all an adventure, and I need to learn to look at life that way too.
Stuart Westwood 