Saving adventure

Meredith Comas, Print Editor-in-Chief

Dear reader,

Hello again from the other side of a computer screen with a blank document and an electric cursor. It’s nice to see you.

Once again I find myself as I usually am on afternoons such as this, wondering just what I’m supposed to write, how to impact you and change perceptions so excalibur-ian that King Arthur himself submits a lofty defeat in 600 words or less. I doubt I’ll ever see the day but I promise on all the letters of the alphabet if any such adventure ever occurs to inform you in the boldest, above-the-fold means as possible. 

I suppose that’s what I’m here to talk about today: adventures. 

If life has not tickled your nose with adventures’ wonder, I begin to question if you’ve ever really lived.

However, I fear we have lost the art of the adventure, the art of going without a destination. We have ceased to wonder, to explore the unknown, to risk comfort and instantaneous commodity. 

The irony of my computer sitting perched atop my congested desk in my house as I write these words is not lost on me. “C’est la vie.”

Do you remember the stories of our childhoods? The tomfoolery of Huck and Jim, the comicality of Anne and the Cuthberts and the witty intrepidness of Bilbo and the 13? Whatever happened to our willingness, our yearning, to join these tales with every new quest and fork in the road? Which infectious disease of the imagination clawed its way around our minds and hid the calls of adventure so swiftly we didn’t even see the symptoms? How have we become so averse to the experiences and trials that have shaped the very roots of life since the first stories were told?

We have paused our own plot and blamed it on the inconvenience of picking up a pencil. 

Our world has changed and we have allowed it to do so. This change is not an abstract delusion but a veridical effect of what we have permitted ourselves to be blinded to. 

One day that no one quite remembers, we stopped believing in adventures. We closed the chapters and left Huck on his raft, we never saw Anne and Gilbert’s life together and will never know what Frodo did next. No one explicitly told us to close up our imaginations, instead, we looked up from a black-inked page and followed the quotidian masses around us. 

It is my firm belief that every mistake can be rewritten and we must rewrite this pedestrian change we’ve so uncritically induced upon our world. 

It is as simple as refinding our adventurous selves, reopening our books and taking in the stories that inspire education and life. We have to continue to explore what we don’t understand — whether we find it through physical experiences or words on a page that so vividly articulate perspectives and fictions we find ourselves caught in new imaginations and senses previously uncharted. 

It is our duty to preserve the art of the adventure not only for future generations but for those who seek to understand life and it’s complex divergences now — us, the writer and the reader at this very moment. 

This actionable change is imperative to the preservation of the creative and expressive life.

Adventure is ours to save; I beg we don’t let it go unexplored. 

Until I write again, 

“Every mistake can be rewritten.”