“Adventure is out there.”

It’s such an extravagant word, right? Adventure. It means, “An unusual and exciting, typically hazardous., experience or activity.” Who has time for that in today’s world? We’ve got work to do, people to see, lists to be checked off. Unusual and hazardous activities? Only the rich and insta-famous like the @bucketlistfamily have the resources for that. But that’s where you’re wrong. Ok, yes – swimming with dolphins on a Tuesday afternoon is probably not in all of our futures. But it doesn’t take traveling the world to live a life full of joy and exciting experiences. Here’s 5 steps you can take to start living your everyday adventure.

1. Identify what FIRES YOU UP.
For me, the joys of life are found in the perfect shade of green, singing at the top of my lungs, and a great cup of coffee. I mean, who can resist a toasty cup of Chec Rec’s Charger Trax?! Make a list of the things, activities, or experiences that get you excited about life – it can include anything from Mexican food or a great jumpsuit, to long distance running or seeing new places. Add sketches, paste pictures, or just use bullet points. Use this list as your reference – this is the roadmap to making your daily life one worth living.

2. Build “adventure” time into your schedule.
We tell ourselves over and over again – Next week will slow down, that’s when I’ll start working towards my dream life. Stop telling yourself that your life can wait. What you prioritize is what you’ll become. You do have time to live a life that’s filled with passion and adventure – are you going to choose it? Yes, you may have class, work, and practice from dawn til dusk throughout the week, but if that’s the case, block off an hour on Sunday. Stop waiting for the life you want to have to happen to you, and start making time for what makes you happy.

3. Protect that time – you don’t have much of it!
I’m so guilty of this one – at times I’ll spend hours scrolling through other people’s adventures, wishing I had the time and resources to have a life like theirs. Any other Instagram offenders here?? Not only are we wasting that precious time we could be spending cultivating a life we love, but at the same time, these IG highlight reels make us feel like our own lives are slipping further and further into the mundane. Put down your phone, and start living the life you’ve imagined. Stop worrying that your life doesn’t match up, and use all that freed up time and brain capacity to go antiquing, learn the guitar, or plan a daycation. You’ll be amazed the difference it makes.

4. Find your adventure partner.
You know that friend who is always down to try something new? They’re more valuable than you think. My best friend Sarah is my adventure partner. We’ve driven through the deserts of Arizona, spent our New Year’s Eve crafting vision boards, and been trapped in a flash flood on the beach of Lake Superior in the back of her Honda Element, with nothing but a couple of PB&J’s and a flashlight. The kind of friend who holds you accountable to living the life you imagined, and who is willing to say yes to the unknown and potentially hazardous – you need them. Find that person, and work together to start making memories.

5. Reflect and relive your stories.
There’s nothing I treasure more than the stories of life – the ones I’ve told myself, and the ones chronicled by the well-traveled and rich in experience; steeped with wisdom that only time gives. Take the time to document your adventure. When friends are gathered to celebrate, take pictures. When you’re in the car, shuttling to your next destination – write down what you’ve seen and heard, and how it felt. Trust me, you will thank yourself in a few years – when life is busy and friends are across the country, you’ll be able to relive the stories of your life, drawing out even more joy from the moments that have turned into memory. Adventure looks different at different stages of life. Whether you’re playing Settlers of Catan in your dorm room or jetting off to a foreign land, remember that this is YOUR everyday adventure, and start living it today!

Adventure. The word conjures up pictures of snow-covered Alps, the souks of Marrakesh, waterfalls in the Faroe Islands, the streets of Hanoi, the winter roads in Southern Michigan. Beautiful places, different ways of doing things, surprises around each bend.

Seeing new things was something I craved as I finished up college. I’d flown only twice (once when I was 12 to visit my grandparents, and once to D.C. as part of a job application), but had seen much of the States via my family’s summer road trips. My first job as an Admissions Counselor promised travel, though, and that small line in the job description was certainly compelling. I got to know the middle swath of the country, recruiting students for Hillsdale from Minnesota, Texas, and all the states in between. Slowly my travels started looking more exciting -- England with work, France to visit a friend, Italy with work, and so on. Four years after graduating, I moved to Colorado. I kept my job, but changed just about everything else. I was forced to build a new friend group, a new community, to put time into what I thought was important with no one I knew nearby.

For a long time I used the words travel and adventure almost interchangeably. Though adventure has always been a favorite word, I’ve never been careful or specific in its use. Traveling alone and my move to Colorado forced me to see the difference between what I was doing generally (traveling) as separate from the thing that happened occasionally (an adventure). The difference seems small at first, but the implications are substantial.

In my work with the Admissions Office here at the College, I often describe how education takes a strange mixture of both confidence and humility - you must be confident enough to have an opinion, but then humble enough to change it. Adventure, I think, is a physical representation of that same thing. You must be brave enough to put yourself in a situation for certain reasons, then realize that what you learned from that situation might not be what you expected. I’ve had to correct assumptions I didn’t even know I had after meeting people with backgrounds different from my own. My adventures have demanded things of me – to press on, to trust people I didn’t know, to choose to think of the best of people, to change my mind. But my adventures have given me things, too. Most often, I’ve had the inspiration and the discipline to do the next thing, especially when that thing is hard. Maybe your adventure… means taking the class that scares you, building a friendship with someone who is different from you, or moving to a new city where you don’t know a soul.

Winston Churchill talked about how we build buildings and then those same buildings shape us. I think it’s dangerous to “adventure” so much that you have no principles to change. It’s important to invest time and attention into rhythms that echo your principles so that when you have an adventure and return, tired and questioning, those rhythms help you come to a good and right conclusion – maybe somewhere in between what you used to think and what you learned.

But with that specific caution in mind (and don’t do anything too foolish), I would encourage you to put yourself in a situation now and then that will demand a lot of you – physically, intellectually, spiritually –and learn all you can. Maybe your adventure doesn’t bring you to the Swiss Alps or give you picture worthy of Instagram. Maybe it means taking the class that scares you, building a friendship with someone who is different from you, or moving to a new city where you don’t know a soul. Adventures can be big, but they can also be small. The size doesn’t always match the impact it might have on your life. And if you have a beautiful picture to post to Instagram, too? All the better.