Adventurers

My best friend says she’s worked out what she is, she’s an adventurer.  The next day, when she’s driving me to the station before I embark on the uncharacteristically supremely romantic gesture of a five-hour round trip with a chaste cup of coffee in the middle of it, I tell her I was thinking about what she said (I thought about it in the bath, which is where I have all my best thoughts).  She says that after she told me, my reaction (my non-reaction) made her go home and write in her notebook that if she was going to have any more revelations about being an adventurer she should keep them to herself.  My non-reaction, though, wasn’t because I thought she was nuts, it was because I thought she was right:  yes, that’s absolutely right – now on to the next thing.  She does have this unquenchable conviction that life is an adventure, and the next exciting thing is waiting round the corner.  It can make her exhausting to be with, but I feed off her energy as she feeds off my peace.

Lying in the bath, what I was thinking was that the term adventurer has somehow more negative connotations than I know she meant it to, it has suggestions of opportunism that don’t apply in this case.  She said that she was always looking for  fellow adventurer and never found one, and I thought that what I was looking for/invariable find is cerebral types with an ingrained streak of rebelliousness – and then I thought no, that’s not it.  It’s adventurers that I unerringly head towards, but the difference is that I don’t venture until I’m slammed in the face with it (and then I’ll make the most of it: my rallying cry when faced with seemingly hopeless adversity was always: “It’s an adventure!” but it was less a reveling in the circumstances and more an invincible belief in my ability to survive and come out the other end with a good story to tell: nothing like a good face-slamming to up the narrative value).  Because I tend to stand around looking sideways waiting for life to wander into me, I admire those who run into it headlong, and I value those who grab hold of me and make me run into it too.

I suppose that although I was never a scuba-diving. Parachuting, white-water rafting adventurer like she is, I was once more of an adventurer, even if what I was seeking out was nihilism, and now what I seek is a happier temporary oblivion.  My adventures gave me cracks in my heart and soul, not my bones, and the thrill was less of one and more of a growing dread, in the end.  That’s what I’ve learnt to avoid, or at least to avoid heedlessly: I weigh up the options more carefully now before I expose myself to bruises on my inner skin.  I like myself for my ability to learn from my mistakes, even if I bemoan my tendency to have to learn the hard way, and am sometimes perplexed by the lessons that haven’t  yet sunk in.  Perhaps it’s just that fellow feeling I search out: the adventurers who have learnt some things the hard way, but who haven’t stopped believing that it is still all an adventure.