Armchairs and adventures...

...for Knots in the String.

Was she an adventurer?

I doubt that she ever was, really. Mostly she did things because she thought she should, but it wasn’t till later in her life that she had conviction enough to say to herself :

‘This is what I want. I want the armchair or couch, the mug, the camomile tea and I want to be home.’

What was being an adventurer anyway? Was it travelling the world and experiencing cultures? Was it making waves at her university by combining law and arts subjects (gosh, two separate faculties! So difficult for the academics to get their heads around!) and shaking up the status quo? Was it defying her parents and buying a beautiful thoroughbred with her first pay cheque and then competing in equestrian shows and dressage contests.

Was it reporting on radio on agricultural issues when farmers considered that women should be wearing an apron and cooking scones and definitely not talking about bulls and artificial insemination? Was it an adventure to be a TV presenter? Was it being a stay-at-home mum when most thought she wasted her life? Was she adventurous when she became an environmental protester?

Adventurous perhaps to become an indie writer when society said one wasn’t a proper writer unless one was published by the Big Five? Was she being an adventurer because she chose to write across genres when one really shouldn’t because ‘it weakened one’s brand’?

Was she being an adventurer when she and women friends chose to paddle sit-upon kayaks in the open ocean up and down the coastline for many years? A posse of late middle-aged women who dared?

Was she adventurous when she chose to become a cold water dabbler, or when she danced on stage in a concert? Or today even, when she hopped (kind of) onto her $10 bike and raced with her grandson, pretending she was in the time trials of the Tour de France?

I look back at this adventurer, if I could be called that, and I just see a life well lived – no adventure in the pure sense of the word. If being an adventurer has any meaning at all to me, it is to defy others’ opinions of what one should do and just get on with what one would like to do. Being self-sufficient. My mother used to say ‘Do it. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.’

What was the last thing I did that might be considered an adventure? Probably the ballet concerts last November, I expect. Adventurous for me because I get so nervous, because performance is not my forté. And a definition of adventure is ‘an unusual and exciting or daring experience’.

Doing:

Having been given the greenlight to return to what I love, I garden. Salient lesson in how much I can bend and stretch. Ouch!

Sitting on the couch, I realise that the book I began to write just before I went into hospital is becoming a novel of intent. I started to build a Pinterest board of images to inspire me – it’s a sure sign that I’m serious about Act Three and so the little grey cells keep turning over and over, thinking, finding words. That is an adventure.

Watching:

Tour de France – admiring the countryside as the peloton pedals on. Those chaps are adventurers – risking life and limb on harsh downhill runs and around hairpin bends that make me squeamish. I gaze at the scenery for the riders, because they don’t have time to soak it all in themselves. One rider passes by on the screen with a grazed bare buttock from a fall that ripped lycra and skin away.

Alone USA. True adventurers who must survive alone in the wilds of Vancouver Island’s wilderness, with bears, cougars and wolves. Hell’s Bells! My life is a picnic by comparison! And on that note, this

Your Spirit Animal & Jane Austen Does It Again

from Susan who writes about bears and coyotes in her life. She is an adventurer.

Reading:

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson. It is the right sort of book when I need it to be. I recommend it. Set post-WWI when women had begun to find themselves.

Still listening to Giles Kristian’s Arthur. Still 11/10. Kristian writes with pure lyricism, ballad-like, even with the hefty, bloody violence of the times.

And so I wonder if I might consider this year an adventure. Maybe. The convolutions of the year have been a daring experience. But then when all is said and done, I’m the armchair adventurer who loves her couch, her favourite mug (a blue and white Spode) filled with camomile tea, and her home that sits in the middle of a garden where she can hear the waves and feel the breeze from the ocean.

Truthfully, though, isn’t life an adventure? The very act of living to the best of our abilities no matter who or what we are and making the best of everything? I think so…

Song for this week? This

Why you may ask? Because this was my personal theme song when I was just beginning university adventures in 1967. I loved it!