Life Should Be an Awfully Big Adventure
Think back to being a child for a moment. A trip to the park. Visiting a friend. Building a camp at the bottom of the garden. Counting down the days to the summer holidays. None of it sounds like much when you say it out loud as an adult, does it? And yet, so often, these are the very things we remember most clearly, decades later. The treehouse we built. The bonfire in the garden with friends. Sneaking just that little bit further from our parents’ watchful eye — maybe into a cornfield, maybe to pick blackberries from the hedgerow nobody else seemed to know about.
What made those moments stick wasn’t the activity itself. It was the imagination we brought to it. A walk to the park was never just a walk to the park. Somewhere along the way we became pirates, or we were convinced there was a pot of gold waiting just over the next hill. Our imaginations were switched on, full volume, all the time. And because of that, the days felt long, and they felt like treasure.
Of course, not every day was a play day. Children deal with plenty that’s hard — the bully at school, a bereavement in the family, worry about money, conversations overheard through a door that weren’t meant for young ears. But for most children, there’s still a pull towards the positive, or at least an attempt to find a bit of light even on the harder days.
I think of my own grandmother — my father’s mum. She was raised in a Barnardo’s children’s home after her father died, because her own mother, quite simply, wasn’t kind to her or her younger brother. Years later, as a grown woman, she would stack tins of food in her cupboards and open that cupboard door with real delight. “Just look at all that food I’ve got,” she’d say, and then she’d spend the afternoon making pies, cakes, stews — pure pleasure in the doing of it. She always kept her cupboards full. Looking back now, it’s obvious why: she’d known real hunger as a young girl. But you’d never have known it from meeting her. She was one of the most positive, fun, and full-of-life women you could hope to meet, at least that’s how she showed herself to the world.
Her closest friends were mostly men, most of them gay, and she and my grandad would holiday with them in Spain every winter, coming home with wonderful stories — the antics they’d got up to, the jokes, the songs, some of them properly off-colour for their time. Before Spain it was Malta, and when I was very small she’d spend months at a stretch in Florida with friends she’d made out there. She made the most of every single day she was given.
I tell that story because it says something important: a hard start doesn’t have to write the rest of the story. My grandmother had every reason to shrink from the world, and instead she kept chasing adventure right through her life.
So here’s my hope for you today, on a Sunday, a day made for a bit of reflection. Don’t just think about the difficult things — think about the real positivity that’s been in your life too. Remember when you were wonderfully imaginative, full of play, full of the need to sing and dance and run towards the blackberry bushes. That person hasn’t gone anywhere.
Starting today, maybe we can all begin building little adventures back into our lives — even if it’s nothing grander than a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea eaten out in the garden, watching the butterflies go by. There’s something in that simplicity worth holding onto. Life doesn’t have to be about the big accomplishments, the next milestone, the next achievement. It can just as easily be about making every single day its own small, joyful adventure.
That, I think, is the real secret. Not one enormous life-changing adventure to chase after, but hundreds of small ones, strung together — a walk, a phone call to an old friend, a new recipe, an afternoon with no plan at all. Look for them. Better still, go and make one today.
