Adventure

When we were children there was so much to learn: how to tie our shoes, how to ride a bike, how to use a fork properly, timing a belch outside your mother's hearing to the delight of your friends and the disgust of your sister.

Failure and frustration were our constant companions along with sitting in time out while our sister smiled smugly just out of reach.

Slowly, painfully we learned with scraped knees and injured pride how to master riding a bike, write our own name.

As children, just as we mastered one skill another challenge presented itself. Once we'd learned to make our mark, the teachers introduce cursive writing.  Here we were back in the trenches together making  curvy, looping, shaky letters.

We graduated. Went off to college. Learned to manage our calendars, our bank accounts and our hearts. We slipped into comfortable routines. We became ourselves with mortgages and children's schedules, car maintenance and a yard to mow.

Those heady days of adventure and self discovery behind us, we became, at least in our own minds, a respectable, functioning adult. This gig of adulthood can be a weary treadmill. Our lives still contain failure and frustration, but it's an anxious kind of frustration full of questions: will I make the deadline, do I measure up, will the downsizing impact me? This adult failure and frustration has none of the joy of the wind in our hair as we bike down the street, wobbling from side to side.

Six or seven years ago, I found myself kayaking on Lake Superior with a group of couples and men. Prince Charming was back on shore, sick with a cold. The two person kayaks and those powered by the men, were soon far ahead of me as I struggled with the wind and waves and office worker arms to pull my paddles through the water with any kind of competence.

At first I was mad. I was mad that I was so weak.  I was mad at Prince Charming for being sick. I was mad at the others for not waiting.

And then something wonderful happened.  A tiny little shift of heart. Instead of being a mad, middle-aged woman in a kayak.  I was a six-year-old falling off my bike, skinning my knee on the gravel drive, crying mad, hot tears.

Suddenly I remembered that it all worked out.  I can ride a bike and tie my shoes and write my name in cursive, even if it's still shaky and barely legible.

I spent the rest of the time paddling and thinking about how comfortable I'd become in my routine. I'd put my heart in a safe deposit box and lost the key. It was time to search for the key to novelty and adventure.

Isn't it always true that when we go looking for something, we'll find it? I found my fount of inspiration in author and illustrator Vivian Swift's work and books--When Wanders Cease to Roam and Le Road Trip--A Traveler's Journal of Love and France.

Ms. Swift's beautiful watercolors of the everyday

Courtesy of Vivian Swift's blog

beauty

That is so easily overlooked, taken for granted

inspired me to tackle my own adventure--watercolor painting.

This adventure has been full of failure and frustration and many, many bad paintings. It's been like falling down Alice's rabbit hole into another world familiar and strange, in which skill is like the Cheshire Cat, fading in and out of view.  I've learned that tree bark is purple and blue and rocks are orange.

Routine feels comfortable and pretty soon it feels tired, worn, boring. Adventure lies within your grasp.  Check your heart out of the safety deposit box. Embrace the childish sense of adventure.  Take a piano lesson, zen doodle your heart out, rock out in a Zumba class, splash and thrash your way across a swimming pool. Life is so much richer.  

My adventure in painting has been an adventure in giving up the rather rigid confines of ego and control. It shatters my sense of competency. Doing something badly day after day, with only a little glimmer that I'm getting better makes me think twice before offering some unwanted, sure to be brilliant, piece of advice. Maybe I don't know as much as I think I know. Maybe life isn't as certain as I'd like it to be.  And then there's the thrill of seeing it all go well, only to ruin it with the next brush stroke and then paint my way back into beauty. Painting tests the power of fortitude, forgiveness and redemption.  

Anything that you do that invokes the childish sense of failure and frustration will send you through that amazing fortitude, forgiveness, redemption loop.  Go give it a try.

Take good care of each other friends until next week.