The Adventure Paradox
The first lesson of adventure: In order to write the map, you must lean into the mystery ahead.
In the fall of 2006, I had a bad day.
We all did, to some extent — depending on who you asked. Only for me this bad day happened after a long week of teaching that came on top of a grueling period of existential angst. I was depleted and overworked; trying to keep a lid on all the emotions that didn’t want to be put away. That day in particular I wasn’t doing well coping with the chaos arising in what felt like every corner of my life. I felt trapped in my situation even though generally I was satisfied. I had no explanation for why.
That day I went to work feeling defeated. A common joke in my classroom revolved around my obsession of the moment: manifesting a man with a yacht. The perfect escape, if you asked me. Boats had been a recurring symbol that kept washing into my world, and I didn’t quite know what to do with their message.
I thought about working for a cruise ship and decided against it.
As a creative coping mechanism, I decided to LARP on social media. No one was working anyway. We were all on Facebook sharing memes of the world on fire, so presenting a modern cruise ship pirate game seemed like an obvious — and necessary — escape to fill my morning break. I quickly typed a status update and hit post:
Anyone interested in buying a MEGAYACHT and pirating around in international waters please leave your name and preferred title below. I am Director of Leisure so don’t even step. SERIOUS REPLIES ONLY.
The resulting hilarity in the Facebook thread took on an interesting meta-dimension. People emerged from the woodwork to comment; some I had never interacted with on the platform before. A small society started to form, each one of us taking up a playful role and post vastly different than our everyday identity. It was exhilarating and strangely liberating to envision being on a boat, lost at sea with these strange friends and friendly strangers. How ironic that for the first time that day — playing this game on the internet — I felt human again.
I asked myself an interesting question: Where did this fantasy end and the real world begin?
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The second lesson of adventure: The stories we tell determine our steps.
William Irwin Thompson once wrote that “Every advancement casts a shadow.” From many perspectives, it seems we are living through one now. The sacred technologies that connected us globally have also exploited our trust, delivering us into the hands of a clown and a psychopath. What felt chaotic before feels cataclysmic now; too many hands steering the car towards the edge of a climate cliff.
To beat the symbol of the boat to death: as a society and a species, we are a ship adrift.
Technology allows us to live in many worlds at once while blurring the lines between them. It increases the amount of complexity present in a system while simultaneously warping our experience of time within it. Too many choices leads to mind cages. Technology — like other forms of intelligence — has a way of manipulating, distorting, and amplifying information, making it hard to define with any accuracy what, exactly, is true for long.
Buckle up, because that’s just the beginning.
Carl Jung pointed out that humans speak across history in universal symbols. These archetypes are encoded signatures: potent images that communicate living patterns of behaviors that transcend culture and time itself.
A boat is not just a boat.
We are all telling a story together — until one day we are not. That is the underlying tension behind the bleating words on my screen as I surf the tide of thoughts: the feeling of something dissolving in America. Something dissolving America. The signs of an old story slowly coming apart and also coming alive. It is being re-written around us — and also we are running out of time.
Everything feels urgent. In a dying empire, violence becomes pervasive. We sign up for escape room experiences and jump out of planes to shake ourselves awake. Chasing death on a date. Scroll until our thumbs are numb. Drop our phones on our face.
The ancient symbols are still alive by the way; they’ve just evolved into emojis. And somehow, these symbols — such as a magic vessel in deathly waters — are embedded deeply into our collective consciousness, providing us with a means of navigating murky futures.
The symbols don’t change. Only the stories do.
We are living through a tremendous moment in time. Our species is currently rewriting the story of humanity. You are alive, which means that you are an active player in the current iteration of the game of life.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had a momentous task to accomplish together as a global tribe but now we have so much more information to sift through; the glut and flood of data from all directions contributing to our collective paralysis at key junctures. Thus the existential allure of a miracle boat is not lost on me — nor the need at this critical moment for a similar conceptual vehicle; a deus ex machina to enter the scene and save us from ourselves before we run out of fertile soil.
Of course we feel lost at sea.
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The third lesson of adventure: Stop seeking small answers.
As a human, your evolution hinges on expanding yourself through the defining moments and milestones of your life. You are here to liberate yourself from zombie waking death. Your soul said yes to the quest of a lifetime, so it’s time to face the truth, O spicy one: you’re already a pirate on some level. Gather ye a ship full of scallywags for the journey, because the winds are shifting and we need all hands on deck for this next wave.
Humans are a species of expansion on a slippery slope. As a nation, we’re scrambling to define a set of rules — or rather a new story — to right this ship. We’re headed into new horizons, drawing the map as we go, and to be honest none of us have a fucking clue about what the future holds — beyond the fact that we need some better answers fast.
It’s easy to stay safe. To protect your assumptions instead of risking an action that might lead you astray. But the thing about life is that there is no path. We all crave to touch the beating pulse at the center of our life, and in order to do that we must let go of the map.
The pioneer spirit always seeks a new frontier.
It is so very human to reach. If history is any proof, humans are here to expand into the knowledge that we are actually everything. And so our sweep and reach has been unforgiving and expansive, to the point of potential extinction. We are here to ask and express: “What’s next?” The boat is just another symbolic microcosm of something much larger and more infinite here. After all — isn’t Mother Earth the original MEGAYACHT? Either way, it seems that this journey is about asking a question so big that another world had to be built to answer it.
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The fourth lesson of adventure: The play must continue.
When you are listening with presence, the patterns start to reveal themselves. The more you engage with the game of life, the more you will start to see the rules in play. In an infinite game such as life, there are a few core patterns that fuel the engine of the endless machine. Thus, one of the rules of the game is to keep the game in play.
Humanity’s evolution seems to be about unlocking access to greater levels of the game of life through the technologies we invent to expand ourselves. We can’t stop, and why would we? That’s not in the interest of a wheel in motion. At the end of the day, I believe the experiment playing out on the planet right now is really about asking a question so big that a new world had be built to answer it.
Most days, people desire answers that keep them safe. It’s easier to Netflix and Chill than reinvent the wheel. Yet — we live in a world that constantly changes. The ability to go beyond the survival grind hinges on our ability to roll with — not resist — chaos and complexity.
When we play, we risk. We let go of the stories and drop into the game unfolding in every direction around us. We become present to our participation. If we are brave — if we are willing to risk everything, including and especially our sacred egos — then we might encounter the explosive flow of life that lies beyond our fear; that is the foundation of your radiant being. This is the power of coming alive: you experience yourself transform in real time.
If there is something adventure has taught me it is this: it is a radical act to walk off the map. To ignite yourself without apology. To allow the world in. For when we accept that we aren’t guaranteed anything we give ourselves more room to grow. And if you haven’t noticed by now: growth is the alchemy of life.
So walk the plank again and again my friend. The game we are playing requires everyone and the good news is: YOU get to decide what comes next.
The fifth lesson of adventure: Walk up to the edge and don’t look back.
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Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
