Finding My Inner Strength To Seek Adventure
My world opened up once I stopped listening to voices from the past
I’ve never considered myself an adventurer. The mere suggestion would have made me laugh twenty years ago. Others though, may have a different perspective today.
As a boy growing up in and around Edmonton, Canada — the western prairies butting up next to the Rocky Mountains — I had a fun and carefree childhood. Riding bikes along country roads, wading into creeks and sloughs looking for frogs, tadpoles and water beetles and catching mice in the farm fields. As I got older, we rode dirt bikes in the fields behind our home.
My childhood enthusiasm crumbled when I got older. I wasn’t as strong and athletic as some of the other kids in my class so I was bullied. I even had a phys ed teacher in the tenth grade who liked to pick on me. Whoever didn’t beat me on the track would have to do pushups. Somehow, I found the power to run faster than I ever had, and only a couple of kids passed me. The teacher was just as surprised as my classmates… and me.
Then real life interfered and I settled into my adult life — the working years — struggling to make ends meet like just about everyone else. Who had time for adventure? Who had the money? And more importantly, I wondered if I had it in me.
My first real job was at a radio station in Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. My friend and I woke up at 3 a.m. under the midnight sun, loaded his canoe onto the roof of his car and headed out for adventure. We found pristine lakes and streams and rarely saw another human. It was meditative to slowly stroke the oar through the glass-like surface. The only sounds were of the loons and the distant caw of the ravens.
We’d get home with enough time to eat and shower before heading to work at the radio station. It was the best way to wake up despite the hordes of bird-like mosquitoes.
When I moved to Central Alberta, I worked in morning radio. I got off shift at noon and drove my black Camaro with a T-roof to Sylvan Lake to spend my afternoon at the beach. I had the music blaring and the T-roof open as I cruised the streets. After spending the afternoon soaking up the rays, I got home from the lake tanned and hungry. I’d eat, sleep and do it all over again the next day.
Twenty-five years later, during a particularly difficult time, I was looking for a purpose in my life and a distraction from my grief. When my mom died from Lewy Body dementia it sent my world into a tailspin.
A workmate told me she’d read about a fundraising program with the Arthritis Society. If you could raise ten thousand dollars, you would get a free trip to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I decided this was exactly the distraction I was looking for.
The fundraising was the easy part. The trip itself was fraught with problems including a potentially life-threatening illness. I kept reinfecting myself with salmonella. I didn’t know it at the time but found out when I got home that the protein bars I brought along were tainted. But I persevered and in the process found my inner strength to reach the summit. I could do anything I set my mind to. That alone changed the trajectory of my life.
Over the next several years, I cycled across Vietnam, scuba-dived in the Red Sea, and walked 333 kilometers along the Camino de Santiago from Porto, Portugal to Santiago, Spain.
I hot air ballooned over Cappadocia, Turkey, rode camels in the Sahara and the Thar deserts, scuba-dived in the Red Sea, and cuddled an orphaned baby elephant in Sri Lanka. I traveled through India for three months, moved to Tel Aviv, Israel and challenged my phobias along the way.
Once I started, I couldn’t stop and my life became richer for it. The world was open to me now that I let go of the voices from my past telling me I couldn’t do something. That I wasn’t enough. Not strong enough or smart enough or capable of facing any of these challenges.
My high school gym teacher, the bullies and the naysayers were wrong. I am enough and I have proven them all wrong. Most importantly, I have shown myself that the only thing stopping me from doing anything in life is me.
Thanks for reading.
This will be one of the topics discussed on Monday September 8th at 1:30pm ET when I am a guest on Cory Vinny's Radical Paths Podcast https://radicalpaths.substack.com/ - Cory and his husband get it and recently flipped their lives to sail around the world. Tune in and get inspired!
When you took the job in another province early in your career, where nobody knew you or your history, your new friends saw you as someone with all the human possibilities and treated you as such. It allowed you to see yourself differently and from there grew your zest for adventure. Once you began to evolve out of your childhood trauma, there was no stopping you. Fantastic!
PS- I just spent the summer traveling the Alaska highway (detoured in Edmonton for a new solar battery for the truck camper and an epic steak dinner), south central Alaska, the Top of the World Highway, and the Cassiar. Spent a lot of time in the wilderness, off-road. My soul is sparling with gratitude for all the experiences.