When I was younger, I wanted to do something never done before. I wanted to conquer the world and stand on the tallest mountain. As I grow older, I see every day as a new adventure. I was once told that if I wanted to find God, I need look no further than a flower. That stuck with me. It has turned into my unsolvable koan. (A koan is often a paradoxical riddle used in Zen Buddhism to provoke enlightenment.) I am fascinated by everyday, “ordinary” adventures, like the things I can discover in my own garden, or how bicycling down the same path is never actually the same.
So, as I grow older, sharing my adventures becomes more difficult as my definition of an adventure becomes less colloquial. Everything — Yes, I believe everything! — is an adventure of exploring the unknown and experiencing things never experienced and creating things never created. The challenge is having the eyes to see it, and I believe that if I am living a life full of integrity, I tackle every day like a new adventure. Not only is the world filled with wonders, but it is also a world where you can create new wonders. In a way, it isn’t the top of the mountain or the flower in the garden that is wondrous, but it is the creation of the new experience — the combination of both you and the flower. And, everyone who climbs that mountain or sees that flower will create something new and add it to the oeuvre of humanity.
I hope this story provides a little inspiration to you, my reader. For me, the author of this article and my life, it is a note to myself, a reminder that I’ve lived many adventures that remain untold, like lunch with some billionaires in the Bahamas, living in a tree house in the Dominican Republic, being seen on the BBC as one of the drunken revelers on New Year’s Eve in Manchester, hunting rabbits as a child with a homemade bow and arrow, and many more. I’m afraid someday they may be lost to history. Even my famous book about cycling the world may be lost when I’m no longer here to shepherd it through a noisy world. But… Isn’t that the way of most adventures… most days?… most lives? Perhaps I should worry less about recording my adventures and just go live another one. Perhaps, they will die with me. Perhaps that is where they belong.
Footnotes
After writing this story, I stumbled upon the poem “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake, which must be where I got the idea that I could find God in a flower. It begins:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
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