Adventure in an age of uncertainty

Inequality, pandemics, war, and, above all, biosphere collapse, are all on our screens daily, and more than ever we feel these directly in our own lives. The interconnectedness of these crises, and how they refract through our personal, inner worlds - as well as our communities and the world around us - make this the era of "meta-crisis". So, surely, there’s no time for the folly of adventure?

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Growing up on a small farm in England’s Westcountry, adventure has for me always felt "in the blood" and an inextricable part of who I am. As I got older, this went from fields to moorlands, and later from moorlands to mountains. In my late teens and early twenties, I chased the thrill of these sublime environments all over the world, climbing to hundreds of significant summits in Europe, Asia and South America.

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Despite the many failures that come with mountain climbing - and there’s a lot - there’s not a single climb I regret. However, I have for a long time felt uncomfortable with the dominant cultural narratives of adventure, and specifically how bound these experiences are - particularly in Britain - with our colonial past, and the fanciful idea of “conquering” anything, let alone a mountain.

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For me - and I know for many - there is another way of understanding adventure. This adventure is primarily about learning through doing. Actively exploring, by moving in and through the material world, this is adventure that heightens our sensitivities, and sensibilities, expanding our perspectives and enabling us to rediscover our innate connections with the world around us.

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It has no relation with summiting the mountain, or being the first to do this or that, or to go here or there. It has little to do with being the first person to travel by tricycle from Cairo to Cape Town with one had tied behind your back. Instead, it is a profoundly personal experience that can take place anywhere, but it is entirely dependent on, and universally enveloped by, our animal, bodily experience of that place, nature, and the present moment.

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For me, it requires reverence for the complexity and majesty of our wider ecology - a deep ecology of meaning that goes beyond our prevailing humanism - and an acknowledgement of our place in global systems far beyond our comprehension. It depends on our ability to unlearn some of the mind-body dualism that continues to dominate our culture, and to reach beyond the ego to discover a deeper humility for being amid an interconnected environment.

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To adventure fully, as the great phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, we must “know the world not through our intellect, but through our experience”. In the hyper-globalised, digitalised, knowledge-wedded world, however, where information floods our senses through our screens, and where our attention is stolen by innumerable faraway threats (and treats), this is perhaps more difficult than ever.

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Yet, true adventure may also never have been so crucial, and the first step couldn't be easier. For me, adventure as learning through doing, and moving the body through the more-than-human world in a fundamentally sensitive, reciprocal - and felt way, thereby relinking thinking and feeling through action - begins with stepping outside. Outside the house, outside the town, outside the norm. And, eventually, outside the mind.

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The good news for adventure-seekers is that the adventure you seek is right here, right now, wherever you may be. Sometimes this will be big overseas journeys into the unknown, sometimes it will be the challenge of a mountain, a relationship or a homecoming. But always, this can also be small, daily moments of discovery based on exercising curiosity, connecting deeply, and recognising our place in nature.