When was the last time you went on an adventure? Probably quite a long time ago. Summer often leads us to be outdoors more and to try new things so it is a perfect time to cultivate, create and embrace our sense of adventure.
The word “adventure” is often only used when we are talking about or to children, but even when it is discussed by or about adults it tends to be mentioned only in terms of going abroad, perhaps for a longer period of time.
But creating a sense of adventure does not need to be expensive, time-consuming or grand, it can be small and simple, and yet have profound impacts on our health – physically, mentally and emotionally.
Adventure can be doing anything new, or the same things differently. It can be going to new places, meeting new people, starting a new hobby, making the same journey but using a different route. It can be trying to cook a new recipe, or listen to a different genre of music, or it could be using your mind and imagination to create stories, or to find solutions or to push yourself out of your comfort zone and feel the fear of the unknown but still do it.
Perhaps if we focused on the benefits of embracing a sense of adventure and understood more then we could start to prioritise it and make it part of our everyday lives.
We can get stuck in our old ways, go to the same old places, see the same old people and do the same old things. Life can become a habit that makes us feel stuck and robotic.
Being adventurous has many benefits for your health and wellbeing that we don’t even think about.
Connects you to yourself
Life can be so busy that we don’t often get any time or space to really check in with ourselves – how we are feeling, what we are doing and why, and what we want.
Adventure has been shown to improve trust in yourself, your resilience emotionally, improve your sense of autonomy and how competent you feel. Getting out there and pushing your comfort zones and boundaries can allow you to learn more about who you are and what you enjoy as well as giving you a new perspective on life. Adventure gives us space mentally and emotionally from all of the problems we face in life and this space can also help us find solutions.
Climbing a bouldering wall or using a map to hike across a new area, or perhaps trying a new hobby, can allow us to discover new skill sets and talents we never even knew we had. Adventure can help us know who we are now and not who we were labelled as 20 years ago.
Connects you to others
We can get stuck in a routine which tends to translate into seeing the same people over and over again. This is no bad thing necessarily, but it’s also important to get out and connect with new people who can give us a fresh way of thinking about life and how we see things. We can learn a lot from new people and it can open up a whole sphere of possibilities.
Adventure can also allow us to change the nature of our relationships with the people we already know. Sometimes our existing relationships can get a bit stuck or feel “dusty” and doing something new and exciting and different with our friends and family can mix it up and allow us to connect more authentically and deeply, and really refresh these relationships.
Connects you to life and all its possibilities
Having variation in your life and trying things that are different can open up a whole new way of experiencing life. We see things in a way we haven’t seen them before, we reflect on what is in front of us differently and we are often willing to take more risks with different aspects of life.
Adventure makes us feel more alive and to live our days more fully, making memories and making every moment count.
Maurice Saatchi: I used to adore capitalism – then I had lunch with Margaret Thatcher