- Do you have a sense of guilt about satisfying your own adventure desires?
- Isn’t adventure an entirely pointless and self-indulgent pursuit with no value to society?
- Plus: scroll to the bottom for a question about why I’m Vegan… 🌱
Back when I was young and free I experienced zero guilt about going on adventures. Today the sense of guilt about satisfying my own adventure desires is linked entirely to my family and has two prongs: guilt about reckless risk, and guilt about time away. Leaving a young baby at home to go and row across the Atlantic Ocean in a very small boat ticked both those boxes magnificently!
My attitude to risk changed with fatherhood. I still craved difficulty, but now I abhorred danger. Rowing across the Atlantic, I was filled with overwhelming guilt knowing that I had left behind my toddler, baby girl and wife.
It would be a magnificent jape if all went well, an excellent story for the grandkids; but what a stupid, selfish escapade driven by vanity should it leave my children fatherless.
You cannot go alone into the wilderness for months and also be a stay-at-home dad. You cannot teeter across a crevasse field without feeling somewhat reckless. (I wrote about this a lot in My Midsummer Morning.)
Since then, my interest in dangerous expeditions has waned considerably. Dying on an adventure feels inexcusably selfish to me nowadays. (The dark side of extreme adventure is explored thoroughly in the excellent book Dark Side of the Mountain, which I found somewhat uncomfortable reading!)
The second prong of adventure guilt is the amount of time it requires. Time you could be giving as a volunteer. Time that your better half might believe to be better spent in the dirge of DIY, the ennui of IKEA, or the care of children. (All of which have the compounding effect of making me yearn even more for the empty hills!)
This is not new, of course. 2000 years ago Seneca wrote on the shortness of life, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
This backdrop of masses of adventurous souls yearning to breathe free out in the hills is what made Microadventures my most helpful book. That is not accidental: the entire concept grew out the conflict between the adventures I yearned for and the guilt I felt.
The conundrum is not exclusive to adventure: I have not played a single cricket or football match since my kids were born, and hobbies from aerobics to Zumba, band practice to yoga all suffer at the shortness of time.
It makes me sad and frustrated that my road bike, packraft and 100l rucksack are all gathering dust. But I also accept it and work hard to squeeze in my adventure fixes around the margins of my days. In reality these are often substitutes for adventure as I live prohibitively far from any true wilderness.
I lift weights in the gym at 6am to get the endorphins of exercise before taking my kids to school. I swim in rivers to taste joy and fun and vitality. And I climb a tree at least once a month to keep connected with nature.
All of these things are important to help me be a better, kinder, calmer, more interesting person, husband and father.
Seneca again: “So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
I suspect he would be happy to join me for a cup of tea in my tree! |
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