What Adventure Means

It is easy to forget the precarious nature of life. When I get caught up in the daily grind and loose sight of the forest for the many stressors in life hidden among the trees (like howler monkeys), it is easy to forget that there is only one minute that is this minute and only one day that is this day and there is only one cup of this coffee that I share with Elise and only one way Sam will tap his cheek just so in precocious contemplation.

I unequivocally do not live every day to its fullest. What fun would that be? Rainy Sunday mornings were made for lounging around doing nothing. They were also made for a face-full of rooster tail on the Sunday bike ride. But I don’t think I would appreciate either as much without having experienced them both.

To me, adventure means never having regrets. I don't want to wake up one morning when I'm eighty-nine, groping in the dark for my glasses and walker, wondering, “What if…?” I'd rather wake up, groping in the dark for my glasses and walker and leaning toward Elise's hearing aid and muttering, "Remember when....??"

I know it sounds trite, but I don’t want to live a life too boring. With a wife and two boys, I don’t care for it to be too exciting, either. But I want to be the one who took the road less traveled. We sometimes make decisions that meet with resistance. It is easy to cast stones from beyond the perfectly-manicured hedges of one’s gated community. From there, it is easy to picture what one’s life would be like in 2 years, 5, 20.

The path that Elise and I have chosen—for now—gives us no such assurances…except to assure that we will keep leaning on one another. And I don’t believe we would have it any other way.

When I first met Elise, I could not have imagined finding a truer, more honest and passionate companion. We have faced enormous challenges. But we have always faced them together and we have always triumphed. I knew we would make a good team when we tackled our first major challenge together. The Guggenheim.

For a school project, I helped Elise construct a model replica of the Guggenheim museum in New York. I found an architectural elevation online and did all the math, creating new, smaller dimensions from the actual dimensions with what Elise calls my 'nerdulator' (financial calculator). As I calculated, Elise cut foamboard late into the night, certainly not starting until a few days or hours before it was due and certainly not starting until after we had both worked a Sunday night shift at the restaurant where we met and certainly not starting until well-oiled at Rooney’s. Nevertheless, we made a good team.

This served as the first of several challenges. Not the least of which has been raising Peter and Sam on 4 hours of sleep a night for the past 6 weeks. But it has convinced me that there is nothing that could possibly rear its ugly head that we—together—could not stare down.

The adventure will be challenging. There will be logistical challenges. There may be lost luggage, lost shipments, long flights, sleepless children, bad coffee, warm beer, generic boxes of mac n cheese. Yes, if we had stayed sequestered in our perfectly-manicured world, navigating life behind the dash of our perfectly-polished, paneled dashboard (in reality, our dashboard is cracked and peeling...really, do we even have a car?) perhaps we would not lose furniture in the Indian Ocean (not to say we will) but we will not have seen the world, either, nor bartered for earrings to mail home, begged for a ride on the back of a rickshaw in a monsoon or binged on seal meat (…we’ll see…)