The Adventurous Mind

Where is your next adventure? What will it be? When will it happen? And, how?

In her book, Deep Play, the modern poetic explorer of all things, Diane Ackerman, writes: "People often ask me where they might go to find adventure. Adventure is not something you must travel to find, I tell them, it's something you take with you."

The adventurous mind is always on the lookout for the new and challenging and wild - something to be explored, tackled, or tamed. Adventure is an attitude, a dynamic inclination, a way of living and working. It's best found where you are. And then it takes you to where you need to be. It's always about what's next. It's the way curiosity moves through uncertainty with danger or delight.

Where do new things come from? The adventurous mind finds them, or makes them. It's the mindset of discovery and creation. It's also the soul of intentional becoming and growth. It's a spirit and a cousin of courage. Its enemy is inertia, armed with fear. It's up to us to cultivate it and free this wellspring of the new from whatever would chain it down and hold it back.

So: Where's your next adventure?

You carry it inside you.

Bring it to the world.

Anticipating the Future

The future is hidden by mist and fog.

Psychologists have recently been telling us that we're really bad at predicting how certain future outcomes of our actions will affect us and feel to us at the time they bear fruit. We ask ourselves, "If I do A, will that make me happy?" Or "If I do B, and C results, will that give me what I really want?" We try to imagine what a different or new or remote set of circumstances will feel like, and apparently, we almost always get it wrong.

There are two reasons we get it wrong. First, the future is uncertain. No one can really anticipate it, in all its details. Futurists have a history of howling failures. That's part of why they keep pointing us to the future - in the past, they haven't looked too good! Some things are predictable. Many are not, and they often interrupt our best planning and anticipating.

The second major cause of failure in anticipating the future consequences of our actions is that we're always extrapolating from the situation and mindset we're in, and that inevitably colors and distorts what we project the future to be. We view the future through present lenses. The problem is that hope and fear, desire and worry, along with ignorance and selective attention, can individually, or together, tint those lenses much more than we're aware.

This presents a problem. It seems to be the core of wisdom to think through the future consequences of our actions. But if our thinking, in so far as it projects future states, which imagining consequences always does, is inevitably flawed, then what are we supposed to do?

Fortunately, for understanding various possible futures, we're not forced to rely only on our own imaginations and projective abilities. We have the testimony of a great many people who have already lived through the consequences of every generally described action, or set of actions, imaginable. Although the details of life, society, and our options change continually, because of technology and politics, and for many other reasons, human nature has always been basically the same. That's why it's important to listen to people who have already experienced what we're thinking about doing. They can tell us how it actually felt to experience creating a small business, declaring bankruptcy, taking out a huge loan, getting married to someone very different from them, or very alike, having children, or separating from a friend or associate or family member who has changed in unfortunate ways.

Whatever situation you now contemplate, it's a specific instance of a general type that people have experienced before. That's why it's important to talk to wise people, and read the advice of wise people who have gone down this road before us. They can help tutor our otherwise unreliable imaginations, and guide us into the level of caution or action appropriate to our situation.

Wisdom is available. Use it well. That will help you in making all your most important decisions and will give you new lenses to help you see through the mist and fog up ahead.

Rational Plans in a CrAzY wOrLd

When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances fit in with them.  Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

Have you ever despaired of making plans and setting long term goals in a rapidly changing world? Long ago, I once asked my CPA how I could plan rationally for retirement.  She said “Unfortunately, that’s impossible.” I now have a new accountant. 

That old CPA’s worry was that things change too fast and too unpredictably to allow for reasonable advance planning. But the best plans resiliently anticipate a changing future. The best plans themselves often need to be changed and tweaked in light of what develops, and what we come to discover as we implement them. But it's amazing how often a well thought through and resilient plan will fit in with developments that could never have been anticipated with any degree of specificity or certainty. Osler was right. Circumstances will somehow fit them.

When a good plan is laid out in a rich and complex world, it can indeed sometimes surprise us how well things work out. So don’t hesistate to plan for the future. Just plan to adapt as your plan develops.

The Wild, Alluring, Unpredictable Next

We're called not to predict the future, but to create it. Uncertainty isn't an obstacle, but the canvass on which we all paint.

Will you, then, just copy what others have done, tracing the lines they've already laid down, and using colors long before mixed, in the hope that this will serve you well? Or rather, will you, perhaps, paint boldly something new?

What we learn from the past can help us to get past the past and move into the distinctive future that our present can best create.