Come along on a little imaginative play. The year is 1914 and you are on your way to the pub for dinner. A 10-year-old urchin sells copies of today's paper. You hand him your penny and soon you settle in to read the classifieds. Your mutton stew arrives. As your spoon lingers mid-air to mouth, steam rising from ladle, you spot it-a notice. It reads in bold letters:
"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success. Contact Ernest Shackleton for this Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition."
Something about that ad pulls you; you sign up for the adventure, along with 27 others.
And what an adventure it is. Your trust is securely saddled. Ernest Shackleton heads the expedition, an explorer known for his stellar leadership and unwavering spirit. Your courage is further housed in the strength of the 300-ton Norwegian built schooner, the Endurance. Once sailing, you travel 12,000 miles, through much of the Wendell Sea, but as expected, large parts of this ocean are uncharted, making the journey, well, not your average walk in the park. At 57 degrees latitude south, massive chunks of ice start careening, pell-mell at the Endurance. For six weeks you battle ice. At seven weeks the ice wins. The Endurance is locked in a gyrating mass of ice, which starts to splinter and strangle the ship like a gigantic vice grip. You need a change of plan. Shackleton offers one. He calmly announces that you will winter here until spring. For a couple of days you work with your other shipmates, taking off supplies, storing food and securing life boats safely on the enormous ice shelf you now call home. While working, your mates amuse themselves with impersonations. They race some of the 60 voyaging sled dogs, and you wager with your bunk mate your rations of chocolate and cigarettes. Your friend Macklin writes in his journal, "Shackleton provides real greatness. He did not rage at all, or show outwardly the slightest sign of disappointment (at the demise of the ship)."
Your camp set, you settle in to see what'll happen to the ship. Soon enough it splinters, a heart-wrenching sound, as you have no radio, cell phone or telegraph at your disposal. When the Endurance's mast finally plunges into ice waters, your heart sinks a little. You go to bed that night unsure of the next move. The next morning you wake at 5 am to Shackleton - he hands everyone warm coffee, the heat from the cup spreading through your hand. He proclaims, "Ship and stores have gone-so now we'll go home." All right then, good idea, I was just thinking that myself. 'Righto, let's get to it!' But you have to wait another half year, until April when the ice has thinned enough to push your 20-foot lifeboat to sea. Your new destination-Elephant Island, a mere 100 miles away. For seven days you travel on rocky, choppy water, worn down by storms that mire your hopes of safe passage.
But somehow, you help pull this boat turned ship on to rocky shore. A few of your mates are worse for wear, and there is speculation as to whether or not they will make it. Elephant Island is desolate, barren, daunting. Life does not burgeon here, and that which does, is short lived. Your boss knows staying is sure death, so he asks you and four others to join him on another unheard-of journey. Your new redirected destination is the whaling camps off the South Georgia island 800 miles north. You agree, and proceed on what has become known in modern times as the most remarkable journey of all times. The rest of the crew stays on the island, hoping against odds for your return. You spend the next 17 days on the planet's stormiest seas. Your fellow expedition member, Frank Worsely, is along, an expert navigator. Due to almost constant cloud cover, he takes only four sextant readings. Trying to measure the angle of the sun while a boat tumbles from side to side is not an easy task. You hope his calculations are accurate as a mistake by one degree could set your boat thousands of miles off course. The lifeboat, known as the James Carid, plunges through snow, hurricane-force winds, and seas as high as 20 feet. One of your mates pulls screws from the boat to fasten to his boots in order to secure footing. The four of you follow his lead.
Surprisingly, you reach South Georgia Island. But the swells and current prevent you from landing where planned. No matter. Shackleton redirects once again. If you can't sail to your destination, you'll walk. Twenty-two miles that is over unmapped glacier-draped mountains. Emaciated and dog-tired, you stumble into a little hut where a whaling captain greets you nonplussed-your crew was long presumed dead. Now rescue, food, and freedom seems viable within days for fellow crewmembers marooned on Elephant Island. But three failed attempts and four months later, you finally greet your mates, slopping on to the shore greeting an elated but beleaguered crew. You're shocked; all 28 men are with you now. Your crew mate, Raymond Priestly, the ship's geologist, writes in his journal that evening, "For swift and efficient travel, give me Amundsen; for scientific investigation, give me Scott; but when you are at your wit's end and all else fails, go down on your knees and pray for Shackleton." You yourself close your eyes among the pungent sting of your friend Priestly's biting aroma - unaffected. Your heart is strangely content and you whisper a song of gratitude for the opportunity to indulge your life in such an amazing adventure.
This story astounds me. It always has. Over the years, I've read numerous books on the giants of the adventure world. I marvel over the strategies employed in Robert Falcon Scott's and Roald Amundsen's race to conquer the South Pole, Sir Edward Hillary and Tensing Norgay's first ever-successful ascent of Everest, Frederick Cook and Robert Peary's aggressive drive to claim the Arctic Pole. Each time, like Shackleton's story, I find myself asking, what enabled them to survive? Was it leadership, tenacity, endurance? What?... Recently, my answer came, from a modern source-Will Steger. Steger has led many expeditions, including one to the North Pole in 1986, and another across Antarctica in 1989-90-an old guard adventurer.
He gets at the answer by defining what adventure is. He says, "Adventure is what's left when cause and reason aren't factored in (and imagination and openness take over)." (Life - The Great Adventures)
LET ME READ THAT LAST LINE AGAIN. Adventure is what's left when cause and reason aren't factored in, and imagination and openness take over.
There was the answer. Clear as day. What enabled someone like Shackleton to survive - for all 28 men to make it through? Their survival depended on leaving their reason and their cause, their goal-orientedness behind. There is no doubt Shackleton was a skilled leader, that each of his men deep down knew a thing or two about endurance. But what ultimately - I have come to believe - enabled him to survive was his ability to give up on his goals - take his eyes OFF the prize so to speak - and let imagination and openness to the new take over. Some have said this story and others like it are about tenacity and grit, but to me that misses the mark. I see it as a story of radical letting go, over and over, again and again, with amazing ease. Regroup. Re-imagine. Restart. Over and over again.
And this is where this starts being less a sermon about how adventurers survive, and becomes more about what is needed for us to survive. What endangers the spirits of many of us is:
In her book, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenricht writes an insightful and indicting passage:
Educated middle-class professionals never go careening half-cocked into the future, vulnerable to any surprise that might leap out at them. We always have a plan, or at least a to-do list; we like to know that everything has been anticipated, that our lives are in a sense, pre-lived. [Which is maybe why so many of us feel like our lives no longer have much life left in them...]
For most of us, this is what I might call the American rut. What our culture says is success-the right, reasonable way to live-she describes as a rut, a pre-lived life. Modern middle class lives, Ehrenricht says, lack imagination, originality and openness to anything novel. And that's dangerous according to her, because we humans were designed for imagination, innovation and yes, surprise. We've just forgotten that, she says, and it's killing us.
As children, I would venture to guess, we all imagined through the possibilities of what we could be: cowboy, artist, diva, scuba diver, ambulance driver, surgeon, minister, writer, adventurer. The ideas were always new, fresh, ever changing.
For instance, a young daughter of my friend told her mother she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. Her mother said, "That's great honey, you can be anything you want." To which her daughter replied, "Really? . . . then, I'm going to be the Loch Ness monster when I grow up!"
Then as teenagers, we limited the possibilities. We started paying attention to what was popular or reasonable. The voices of others-the social templates and expectations-often had more authority than our inner voice and our imagination.
College hits, and we are forced to pick one area of interest. One that can garner a good job with a living wage. Oh sure, a few of us go off to join the Peace Corps, or become an AmeriCorps volunteer. A still smaller few skip school for a year and work as waiters in Hawaii. But those are the rare exceptions. Most of us stick with the plan.
Most of us pretty quickly get a good job, one with stability. We buy a new car and pay off a new loan. We get partnered, mortgage a starter home. Then kids come, and our lives become their lives. Somewhere in our 40s, 50s, 60s, our parents need our help; we contribute to their care, their needs. Responsibility and reasonableness guide the storyline of our lives. Imagination, ingenuity and alternative lifestyles get labeled as the threat.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say this is a miserable route to go. There is a lot of joy in this life for most of us, but there is also a lot of looking like our neighbors lives. Our storylines begin to mirror each other. Somewhere along the way the unique choices get squeezed out.
Here's what Ehrenricht is trying to stress: I think she wants us to take a look at the issue of choice. I understand her as asking us who is in control? Is this pattern, this societal storyline, choosing us or are we choosing it? Are we deciding to make it ours, or is it making our life decisions for us?
For those of us, choosing the pattern-great! Amen. Way to go! Mazel tov! But for those of us who aren't really choosing it but are doing it by default, I think Ehrenricht and these explorers are trying to say to us, wake up. If we want to survive in life-to be alive in life, pay attention to the way that the patterns we live can kill us. Does that sound too dramatic? They may not kill our body, but they often kill our spirit-keeping us from those things that allow our life the opportunity to proceed without the to-do list, without the map.
If you think back to how alive it felt as a child, and to imagine being a fireman one week, a diva the next, a cowgirl the next-that feeling of openness, rather than 'stuckness'-the feeling of-not what do I HAVE to do next, but what MIGHT I do next; I think that feeling of being alive, awake, shouldn't be restricted to 8-year-olds. We should have some way to bring it back into our lives-some way to experience what those adventurers experience-incredibly alive moments, moments made alive because, as Steger put it, cause and reason aren't factored in and imagination and openness take over.
So how can adventure work its way into our life, opportunities to alter our patterns, sometimes?
Well, some are using a concept called psycho-geography to help think our way out of our reason and overly goal-oriented lives.
Last summer, a psycho-geography conference was held in NYC, a gathering of artists, writers and urban adventurers. Psycho-geography is a "stuffy term that's been applied to a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities. Psycho-geography includes just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and patterns and jolts them into a new awareness of urban landscape." [Utne]
Christine Ray, one of the conference organizers, comments on these urban adventures: "Most of us...follow a small set of preprogrammed instructions as we wander through the city: office, day care, grocery store, home (gym, church)... If you track your own path through a typical day, you'll soon discover that your journey is habitual, that you're slowly wearing a canyon through the same streets, the same sidewalks, day after day."
As an aside- I'm curious. How many of you sit in the same seat...or at least the same side of the church every Sunday?
(See, proves my point.)
But, psycho-geography encourages us to buck the rut, to follow some new logic that lets us experience our landscape anew, that forces us to truly see what we'd otherwise ignore. It forces us to get out of our pre-lived lives.
"Many psycho-geographers practice a form of algorithmic walking. Participants walk an algorithm fixed pattern, such as "first right, second left, first left, repeat." In other words, you head in any direction, take the first right, then go two blocks to the second left, then at one block take a left and then repeat the pattern as often as you wish. The result is a remarkable style of travel-not goal-oriented nor random, structured but always surprising."
One fellow described this event, by explaining how he approached a new city he had never been to by applying the pattern - Albert Lea. He said that his normal pattern was to find the water, and then to go there first. But by following the pattern, he found himself in front of a massive fiberglass statue, with a seed cap and overalls. A giant god of farm country. He walked on some more and found himself at a boulevard divide that was elaborately painted with ornate Nordic runes, which lead to an open parking lot with similarly detailed whimsical paintings. He continued on according to the instructions, and ended up at a neighborhood flea/swap market. In the end, he was dazzled by his journey, and was struck by how much he would have missed, had he stuck to his normal pattern of exploration.
This idea of intentionally allowing in randomness and walking away from the pattern makes me think of a friend of Scott's from Chicago: Mary Lou wanted to retire at an earlier age. She wanted to break free from an overly patterned, pre-lived life, but had no ideas about how to do so. She was stuck. She saw the conventional way of doing it, working and saving until 65, and then retiring like everyone she knew. But then a group of her friends suggested they pool their money and buy a 7,000 square foot mansion that they share together-more than enough room for each. Others joined them because they too wanted options and saw this as a great way to usher in imagination and openness to new ideas. One family joined in because they wanted more time with their children, and having a lower mortgage payment allowed them that. Another fellow was included because it gave him the opportunity to write and live his passion. The final fellow was included, well, because he thought the idea was an adventure, one worth being a part of.
I think of another friend, too, this one from Syracuse: Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen owned the feminist bookstore, My Sister's Words, in Syracuse for 17 years. She offered the liberal community a place of respite, self and definition. Mary Ellen is from Buffalo, so moving to Syracuse wasn't a huge jump 20 years ago. Of her 51 years, all have been in Upstate New York. Last year something clicked. A moment where she decided she was doing this bookstore thing for other people, and she closed up shop. She had three cities that intrigued her, places she thought she might like to live, though she had few or no contacts or friends in any of them. She traveled to Madison, Wisconsin; Minneapolis and San Diego. She settled on Minneapolis because she was offered a low to mid-level job at a book distribution company, a job she was clearly over qualified for, but had none of the boss headaches. Last April, she sold most of her belongings and left town. More than a few folks were frustrated with her for not holding out longer, for not making a stand against the mega bookstores. She tuned them out as best she could and started a life from new, from scratch. A wild and wily adventure at 51, one she often doubted the sameness of embarking on before leaving. I saw her in December. She was happier, healthier and more alive than ever before. When she let go of her reason and goal-oriented self, she found imagination and openness to life, a wholeness of being she hadn't experienced in almost two decades. She not only feels more alive-she looks it.
I read this piece the other day, and it felt like the perfect place to end.
[Mary Zelinka]
My husband loved maps. He collected old Colorado Forest Service maps, and we'd spend our vacations searching out long forgotten roads and ghost towns. Each trip should have been an adventure, but he plotted our course so thoroughly that all the mystery and thrill of discovery were lost. We were bound to his yellow-highlighted routes. I'd stare at the maps, trying to understand his fascination, but I could make no sense of them. He told me I was too stupid to read a map and I believed him.When I left him to explore the country in search of a new life, I didn't even take a road atlas-just a little pocket guide that showed only the main highways. Even those I hardly ever found, but I figured out how to get to New York, Florida and Texas. Eventually, I came to Oregon and stayed put.
I've learned to read maps since then, but I usually don't bother with them. I'd rather head off in the general direction of a place and wander around until I discover it on my own. I get lost a lot, but never as lost as I was while married to a man who loved maps.
I'm not encouraging anyone today to leave his or her partner. But I do hope that what I've shared today will better help us to know when and how to leave our maps, our reasonableness and patterns behind. We need escapes, respites, detours from pre-lived lives.
Ossie Davis, the acclaimed African-American actor who died a couple of days ago at 87, once said, "We should not float through life, we should not be incidental or accidental, we shape life as much as it shapes us." Opportunities for reshaping await when we put down our map and take on the life of an explorer! Adventure is always ours.
So may it be.
Amen.
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