A call to adventure worth reading.

Initial Impression

What a fascinating read. Learning about the life of Chris McCandless and his adventurous spirit and his struggle for meaning was an adventure of its own. You can’t help but feel for all the people that he met along the way. The loss that they feel after learning about Chris’ passing during his much desired adventure to Alaska. What a heartbreaking thing to learn about such a kind, free-spirit. It makes you think just how unfair life can really be: those who would do harm or are flipant live on to their old age while the care-free, kind-hearted spirits get taken early. It’s almost cruel. But, that’s really not the reflection I personally got out of this book.

I was gifted the French translation of this book (the book store didn’t have the original version) for my birthday by my free-spirited Italian friend who basically resembles the adventurous nature of Chris McCandless. I’m really glad she gifted me this book because it gives me a window into what inspires her adventures and a little bit of her view on living life. Not to mention the incredible passage that is the ultimate call to adventure that I’m sure everyone who’s read this book knows about: Chris’ letter to Ron Franz.

The call to adventure

“I’d like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.

Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances” (92-94).

— Jon Krakauer Into the Wild [^1]

What an absolute powerhouse of a letter. Now, it’s only part of the letter, but the beginning’s not that important in the context of Chris’ call to action to Ron. For quick context, Ron is a widower whose wife and son were killed by a drunk driver in 1957. He would unofficially adopt various children to help them out and became particularly attatched to Chris. He began to show Ron the empriness that he’d really been feeling for years and just how much he had let his life stop and was just ‘surviving’ until death. This letter, however, changed everything for Ron. He sold most everything and decided to live the more vagabond life for a while in hopes of seeing Chris again, but also to just bring back the spark of life.

Reflection

This letter mirrors a lot of the ideas of living boldly and taking life into your own hands that are talked about to this day. This isn’t unique to Ron, or to the 1990’s. We all, myself included, live while letting life happen to us instead of living life on our own terms. We live the same days over and over hoping things will get better and that life will show us its meaning out of nowhere. But, that’s not really how it works. We have to be the arbiter’s of change and actively search-out meaning and adventure. It’s rare that adventure just find us out of nowhere. if you don’t actively seek it out, chances are you’ll never find it.

That means stepping out of your comfort-zone and taking risks. Now, that doesn’t mean going off and living in the woods like Chris only to die during said adventure, which wasn’t entirely his fault, by the way (read the book). But, it does mean that you have to be the agent that takes the first step. As Chris says, there’s joy all around us to be found. We just have to be bold enough to go out and experience it. Otherwise, we end up on our death beds with numerous regrets because we were too cowardly to want to change. It’s not comfortable, and that’s the point.

I’m just as guilty as everyone else, by the way, of living a comfortable existence. Sure, I made the bold move to uproot my life in Kansas after grad school to come live and work in France and have been here for almost 3 years. But, life is now “comfortable” again as I’ve settled into my new job, my new apartment, and my routines and habbits. That’s not an inherently bad thing, of course. However, I know it’s not where I truly want to be, so I’m working on changing what I need to to create the life that I want. That means, though, that I’ve neglected my adventurous spirit. I don’t go out as often as I used to. I don’t travel as much as I did when I lived in France for the first time 6 years ago. I can be very risk averse because I don’t want to fail, be rejected, or struggle anymore financially than I already do. Yet, I know there’s more out there for me to grasp in order to live my life more authentically and to create the adventure that I so crave to off-set the monotony of the day-to-day. So, this is as much a call-to-action for me as it is for anyone else that reads this book.

The road ahead won’t be easy as it was never promised to be so. Changes have to be made. Hard decisions have to be executed on. Actually taking action needs to be the next step.

What is adventure?

Of course, action will look different for everyone and I think adventure needs to be reframed as it’s too grandious most of the time, which creates unattainable expectations. Adventure could just be taking a walk without your headphones in so that you can actually experience the world around you. Additionally, it will help you get more intimate with yourself and actually force you to learn more about who you are. That was me at one point. I couldn’t bare to go outside for a walk by myself without music or a podcast running through my ears so I didn’t have to deal with my internal monologue and reflections about myself. I couldn’t work on projects without some form of background noise to blockout the chaos that was my mind. Now however, I can take an hour long walk without issue. It gives me time to actually listen to my needs and wants so that I can be kinder to myself and actually reflect on my next steps.

That was a hard adventure to accept in the beginning. It wasn’t fun. It was terrifying. Who likes listening to the demons in their head? No one. The funny thing is though that those demons actually aren’t the majority of what’s going on. They were just the loudest entities. Once I learned to let them tire themselves out and give mental space to hear them out, the more product voices came through to help me reflect on what I’d like to do , who I’d like to hang out with, and how I want to live. It’s not like that all the time, but it happens more often than not. It just takes time and effort.

Also, this adventure is just walking around the city I live in, taking different streets I don’t normally turn down because I have no real direction other than ‘go for a walk’. It’s also free. This goes back to the main point though that ‘adventure’ needs a reframe. Don’t get me wrong, I really want more adventures to new cities, countries, beaches, forests, and mountains. But, I also need to live in the reality that I can’t always have those kinds of adventures because I can’t afford them. Now, I probably could live those adventures, but I’d have to sacrifice some things that I’m not really willing to sacrifice at the moment (I also don’t know what electricity’s going to cost come the end of the year…). But, by accepting walks, new restaurants, and new activities as adventures, that helps nourish my spirit for adventure and reinvigorates my desire to continue living an awesome life and to not just let life happen to me.

I don’t want to get to the end of my life with regrets. I want to get to the end of my life knowing I lived a good one and can pass that legacy on to the next generations. Wife and kids is still an adventure I want to have, but I have to live my life for those to come into the picture. They won’t happen if all I do is stay in my apartment working on projects to make money and self-reflect. I can’t meet people that way and I can’t build and foster relationships that way. I have to be an active participant in the game.

What is your adventure?
What do you want out of this life?
What’s the next step you need to take?
How can you reframe an activity into your next adventure?

[^1]: Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild.