Call to Adventure: Can Stays Become Stories?

I was jolted from sleep this morning by a sound you'd think I'd recognize—my phone alarm. But because I always wake before my alarm, shut it off, and jump out of bed eager to get to the gym, I've not heard it in years.

Today I shut it off, and lay flat on my back, staring hard at the ceiling. I don't know how long I lay there, but when I finally walked into the kitchen, the wall of windows revealed a dead, gray, flat sky. I tossed my nightgown onto the bed and pulled on the same tights I wore to the gym yesterday—the same bra, socks, and shoes. I tied the laces in slow motion, as if for the first time. I watched my hand lift the keys from the console, the cool metal pressing into my palm.

The door clapped shut behind me, but I only remember hearing a sharp echo. An echo that wouldn't stop, even as I left the quiet hallway and entered the garage. The car tires hummed against the pavement as I moved methodically through the dreary day to the gym. Walking the same sloped sidewalk I usually sprint up, exhausted me. I pulled twice on the door handle before it allowed me to enter. I edged past the desk, avoiding even a glance at the weight room. My hand found the stair rail and I gripped it tightly, pulling myself up one agonizing step at a time.

I advanced slowly down the hall toward the yoga studio, my head turned toward the window that spanned 3 stories. This view has been a daily source of joy for me—the Rocky Mountains topped with springtime snow, lining the front range. Today, I saw nothing more than a lifeless cardboard backdrop.

When I entered the studio, relief poured through my body. Next to nature, a dance studio—wood floor, bar, and mirror rejuvenates me and somehow feels safer than home. I watched my reflection in the large mirrors as I melted onto the floor, my body finally able to release the paralyzing tension of the morning, and I cried. And cried. And cried.

I have never known a spring so solemn. Never before have I met the season without being hopelessly, deliriously drunk on its arrival—wild with wonder, reckless with delight. Each year before now, I have thrown myself into the revelry of renewal, chasing emerald tendrils as they unfurl from the earth, watching watercolor skies bleed into the edges of my soul. Every breeze was a whisper of promise, every bloom a reckless confession of unreasonable joy.

But not this year. Not in the quiet prelude to the summer of 2025.

This spring, I remain still. Sober. I cannot afford to be swept away. The rain, once a riotous companion, would have left me breathless, twirling in careless abandon, drenched in laughter. But now, I do not spin. My lips don't part in giddy delight. My eyes, once wide with wonder, now hold their gaze steady, measured, knowing.

This spring, I walk through the fields cautiously, beneath trees that once carried my thoughts aloft, lifting them like weightless wisps of cloud, dissolving into the golden mercy of the sun. How the sun once coaxed me into belief—no matter the circumstance of my life--melting every solemn worry into something bright, something possible. Hope, effortless as breath.

But now, I watch. I listen. I wait. The world hums around me, alive as ever, yet I remain apart. Suspended between what was and what will be. I've lost the language of hope, promise, and possibility—the language of adventure. I know only this moment and the agony of this silent, single focus.

For business, I languish daily on LinkedIn and visit Facebook and Instagram in the same disciplined manner I show up for regular dental visits. In doing so, I accept the memes, aphorisms, cliches, and quotes, and I do so assuming the best, chiming in to support others virtually, and then I make haste to rejoin my real life. It can be exhausting, I admit, the constant and inescapable sense of proving that one's values matter can be tiring. I know I should follow my drive for creativity. I feel it in my gut, and when I don't take action in that direction, I feel depressed. Yet still, I resist taking action.

And then I stumbled upon something meaningful:

"Your ideas are your children, and they're all born handicapped, just as each of us in our own way is also born handicapped. And everyone who wants their ideas to be heard has to fight for them." --Ray Harvey, Whiskey Wisdom

I like to think the person who wrote this understands me and is permitting me what I can't seem to give myself. Permission to fight. Not just for my ideas, but for the energy that gives me life. The energy that will allow me to push beyond the misery my ordinary world has become. The energy that will allow me to move out of my comfort zone and pursue what's ahead. His statement helps me accept that I feel weak, helpless, and handicapped. Utterly incapable of responding to this inner call to adventure.

The resistance that has caused me so much pain begins to diminish. As I begin to think of my ideas as my children, the grief and helplessness are replaced with compassion.

These words, written by a stranger, grip me, and pictures from my past become more vivid than the reality of my muted ordinary life.

I remember the many days I spent with children. The days that turned so quickly into decades.

I remember the many children I loved, not only my own, but children from many other families, and I remember what I learned from them.

These children knew nothing of limitation, they never resisted the urge to explore, create, and become something new. These children would never have resisted a call to adventure.

Suddenly, like a movie reel filling a lifeless screen, images from a particularly lovely spring morning filled my mind's eye.

It was the 1st day of May.

I stood barefoot on the back deck, pulling my sweater tighter around the summer dress I had pulled from my closet, even knowing it was early, that these mountains loved to tease, turning spring's promise from sunshine to rain to sleet in moments. The breeze was chilly, but I was ready for summer. My hands rested on the railing as I tilted my face to receive the warmth of the sun.

My gaze followed the horse as she moved from the barn into the corral, waiting to be released into the field. A herd of elk lay next to the pond beyond the open field, still resting. The neighbor's cat sat like a statue atop one of the log fence posts, waiting for the birds she knew would soon come to visit the feeders that lined our porch.

You were 11, the magical age when imagination still breaks through amid sparks of self-awareness and the pressure of social demands.

I watched you barreling recklessly down the hill that sloped from our house into the meadow below, clutching your little brother's hand tightly as he fought breathlessly to keep up. You stopped for a moment to untangle a tumbling dry weed from his clothes and hoisted him into your arms before rushing on. I stood on the deck, mesmerized by the sweetness of that scene. The stunning mountains rising behind the meadow, your laughter, his giggles, you pulling him close when a deer, startled by your movement through the grass, bolted.

You devoted the morning to gathering wildflowers, tossing them carelessly into the basket you brought. When I entered the kitchen an hour later, I saw the bunches strewn across the kitchen table, and felt the dirt on my bare feet sprinkled carelessly across the floor. I smelled the aroma—rain-fresh dawn wafting through the kitchen. I heard you as you sang together, bending down to help your brother, only 2 years old, tie them into little bunches and secure them into baskets fashioned out of colored paper. Before the sun had a chance to rise high, you filled the red wagon with the baskets, your brother climbing carefully in beside them. You pulled him slowly down the long driveway, glancing back now and then.

The secret gifts were delivered gently to each neighbor's doorstep. When you returned later in a torrent of rain, I met you at the door. Your little brother looked up at me, cheeks rosy, rain dripping from the curls of his hair, eyes shining with joy. "Mommy, that was an awfully big adventure!"

Under a lilac sky, in the sweet hush of the morning, you had left a few cheerful notes from May's chorus of laughter for our neighbor's sober hearts to consider. Unwittingly, you also left this memory for my weary heart. A memory to help me reconsider the call to adventure, to recapture the morning of youth, the energy, and the notion of how simple it can be.

Ray Harvey's words sing again in my mind: "...just as each of us in our own way is also born handicapped. And everyone who wants their ideas to be heard has to fight for them."

Young children don't know they need to fight for their ideas, they just embrace them. Young children live. No hesitation, no fear-trained thought to dismantle the delight that cradles the seeds of inspiration and grows them into massive oaks. Imagination doesn't linger in the false constraint of time.

Imagination knows the oak tree shades the violet before the acorn is even covered by earth. And the child knows the fields are already white with harvest.

Nothing is not nothing. Everything is possible. All is All. The earth laughs through breakfast and far past teatime. The aspen leaves that hang from the trees gathered in bunches throughout the meadow, tremble even without a breeze, simply because they cannot contain the joy of the morning. And morning never dies. Unless you sleep through it. And I know beyond the shadow doubt has cast, that tomorrow, once again, I won't hear my alarm, but will bound out of bed and answer the call to adventure.

We never know what our guests are going through—what they need. Perhaps the experience you offer is the very thing that will allow them to move from the weariness of an ordinary world to the ability to say yes with the abandon of a child, to a call to adventure.