15 - 20 Minute Read

I set off in the darkness of the pre-dawn. The car door closes and I roll off onto the muddy road, rain coming down all around me. It’s 6:00 am and I have to be at my checkpoint by 8:00 am, otherwise I won’t be able to catch the shuttle and make it back to our campsite. Not only that, but there is no cell service (god forbid!), so I have to navigate my way to the ranger station without the crutch of Google Maps that our society is so used to utilizing. As I cruise down the county road with trees closing in overhead, down the way I can see a roadblock setup. “Road closed to thru traffic”, reads the sign. We had ignored the sign last night and driven down the previously intact gravel path, but now a giant bulldozer sits in the middle of the road, tearing it to pieces. I turn the car around, searching for a detour.

I manage to make it to my destination in time, even arriving early enough to grab a breakfast sandwich and a coffee from the gas station. From across the parking lot I spot my transportation at the rendezvous point. Seeing me walking confidently towards him, the driver rolls down the window. A man in a thick black and red flannel with a cotton ranger cap looks down at me.

“I take it you’re the shuttle driver?” I asked him.

“I are”, he responds.

Mission accomplished.

Realistically, the story described above could be put in much simpler terms. We were backpacking down the North Country Trail in Michigan’s Pictured Rocks Lakeshore, and I needed to drop the car off at our ending point so we could jump in and drive it home once we were done with the hike. The shuttle that would take me back to where we were staring the hike left at 8:00 am. It was a chore that needed to be done, and I volunteered to take care of it.

Normal tasks like the one described above face us everyday. We need to make it to the bus stop on time to get to work. Kids need to be picked up after school. The refrigerator needs stocking for the weekend, and the only time you can get to the grocery is in an hour gap you have between work and another commitment. On top of all of these things, we somehow need to try our best to happy with life and find fulfillment in what we do. At first it can be hard to see how these small, menial life events might fit into the bigger picture; but when we look at tasks that are considered to be trivial by most as quests, as critical tasks that need to be accomplished, it gives life a sense of adventure, a feeling of higher purpose.

The events that comprise our lives are meaningful. We can sometimes get accustomed to performing many of them, which is why it it can be helpful to view the things that we do as one of three extremely important components of life:

Quests

Adventures

Journeys

A quest is an undertaking to accomplish a task.

Quests are some of the most important things that we can do on a day to day basis. They may feel inconsequential and unimportant, but they are the foundation of our lives. The way you handle small quests determines how you handle the big moments in life. Quests are habit forming, routine creating tasks that define who we are. They may not be glamorous - in fact, most times they are anything but - yet they are critical to moving forward and developing into the person that we want to be.

Hopping on your bike to get your daily workout in - a quest. Retreating to a quiet corner to squeeze in some reading time - a quest. Researching new information or studying a new hobby - quests. Alone, quests appear to be frivolous, but over time, completing enough of these quests builds your skills, your willpower, and your knowledge, preparing you for adventures, journeys, and the trials that will manifest themselves along your path.

Quests are often where inspiration and exciting events of life take place without us even expecting them. Any chore, any errand, any quick trip to the store presents us with a myriad of manners in which we can take in the world around us, in which we can have fascinating realizations that might change the way we view the world or strike inspiration into us. Imagine a scenario that many of us have most likely been in. You’re sitting at a restaurant waiting for the server to bring you the tab (a quest of her own). It’s taking a bit longer than you want it to…impatience starts to creep in, and you just want the server to bring you the check so you can leave, so you can end this moment. However, if we just stop for one second, if we take into consideration this little piece of paper with spots of black on it that form symbols you can understand and interpret, was once a tree somewhere living in the middle of the woods until someone came along and chopped it down, sent it to a paper mill, ground it into pulp, pressed it into paper, loaded it onto a pallet, and shipped it to the restaurant you are sitting in wishing that you could leave. Now expand this on a grand scale, and realize that yourself, that check, the tree, the table you are sitting at, everything, once came from nothing, and is now something. When you think about the world like that, how could that seemingly trivial moment waiting for the check not contain some semblance of magic, of eternity? These small things that we need to accomplish contain meaning, and the simple fact that you are doing them at all gives them importance.

Framing your building block tasks into quests is just the beginning. Next, we get to go on adventures.

An adventure is a mission to a specific destination.

The newly paved road melted away under my bike’s tires. I glanced down at my bike computer to check our distance - it read 6 miles, which meant we should be running into the bike trail any minute that would lead us from Manitowish Waters to Mercer. Our plan was to bike from Manitowish Waters to Bayfield, a three day ride that would take us 120 miles across the countryside of Wisconsin. Neither of us had bikepacked before, so we weren’t quite sure what we would be in for.

Day one took us 50 miles north to the small town of Upson. I’m not sure if you could even technically call it a town - it was more like seven people decided to build their houses together next to a bar that had clearly seen better days. Camping remotely in the wilderness was one thing, but camping here next to a highway was something different entirely. Being in hard to reach places in the mountains or woods provided a sense of security; being in the country next to a county highway was a bit scarier. Anyone could make their way here extremely easily. Nonetheless, we made it through the night. Day two took us to Ashland, Wisconsin. For some strange reason after Labor Day all of the campgrounds in Ashland close; if we couldn’t locate a place to camp in Ashland, we would need to proceed an additional 14 miles to Washburn - a quick drive in a car, but over an hour on our bikes loaded with gear. We resorted to calling motels, which shows you how sore our butts were from our bike seats. The first motel we called didn’t have any rooms available, but they offered to let us camp in their backyard right on Lake Superior for free. Thanks to their generosity we were able to rest in Ashland as planned and finish up our trip by riding into Bayfield the next day.

When we left for our ride we had a rough outline of where we were going to go, which places we were going to stop at. Things were planned out, but we also allowed ourselves flexibility to be open to change, and most of all to enjoy our bike ride, our adventure. Being a new activity for both of us made it even more of an adventure. There were ups and downs, but what the important thing was that we arrived at our destination safely and enjoyed the ride from start to finish.

Many things in life are similar. Road trips, moving, hikes - we need to get from one place to another, whether on wheels or on our own two feet. The trips are always more enjoyable when we are able to go with the flow, taking in the scenery, keeping ourselves open for whatever might come our way as we travel.

Long or short, an adventure always has an end somewhere. When we put them all together and look at them from a bird’s eye view, we see the big picture - our journeys.

A journey is a trip that has neither a task nor a destination - the reward is in the simple enjoyment of a daily existence that is right for you.

The frigid Minneapolis winter winds howled outside of the car as we drove to the airport. I carried with me two small bags - one carry on, one personal item. These bags contained everything I would need for the foreseeable future. Just two days ago I had put in my last day at a company I had been with for almost five years; now I was hopping on a plane with only a few belongings to start a new stage of my life on Roatan, a small island off the coast of Honduras.

I had no idea what the future held for me, but I had regained something that I had lost for quite some time - and excitement for the uncertainty and beauty of an unstructured existence. For almost my entire life I had followed a “normal” path. I studied hard in high school, graduated from a respectable college with a business major, and landed a job at a budding software company upon graduation. I worked hard, putting in extra time at the office and, from an outsider’s perspective, obtaining success, promotions, and recognition. But I wasn’t happy. Something in my life was missing.

Since graduating college I had walked a path that seemed like it was predetermined for me. Go to college, major in something practical, get a stable job, work your way up the corporate ladder, invest in your 401k. During this time I had also gotten heavily interested in photography and outdoor activities like biking, hiking, camping, and more. I enjoy these activities so much simply because there is no higher purpose to them; when out in the woods or mountains experiencing a new landscape, I am completely focused on the moment at hand. Enjoyment flows through me like a river through the landscape. This is what was missing from my life. I wasn’t living for the moment, or for myself. The things I spent my time on weren’t done for me, but for others. My life was being used doing a multitude of quests and adventures for others, and neglecting my own journey. When we fail to focus on our own journey we can be derailed, living our days on a road that was not meant for us.

Pinpointing exactly what a journey entails can be difficult. It seems like something so grand, so romantic, so far fetched that it can’t possibly happen to us. The truth is, we are all on a journey of our own whether we actively think about it or not; the more we focus on our journey and how we want to live our lives on a daily basis, the more we can actively influence our happiness on a daily basis. The three phases build upon each other - in order to find meaning and fulfillment in our journey, we must find meaning and fulfillment in our day to day quests as well as our longer term adventures. The three tiers build upon each other, and when each is given the proper attention we can create a hierarchy of habit, purpose, and discipline.

Complete the quest. Experience the adventure. Enjoy the journey.

You are a miracle. Walking about in a body made of matter, your eyes interpret other beings of matter using particles and waves from the sun that were created by smashing the same type matter that you are made of together. The words on this blog were typed by my fingers somewhere in the universe, then transmitted instantly using matter and energy into your computer screen so your eyes could process it to your brain. It can be easy to forget that sometimes, but literally every moment of existence that you witness was precedented by billions of years of cosmic activity and biological evolution. When you stop to realize that even the smallest details are truly miraculous, things begin to take on a new light. Life is challenging; there is no way around it. But by giving weight to each action that you perform, by appreciating every moment that you are here in this universe, by creating purpose and meaning to routine activities (by the way, no activity is routine) we can drive happiness in our day to day lives and be satisfied more, with less.

Now that we’ve established the fact that everything in the universe is truly remarkable, it’s time for you to realize that every second of your life is on the same level. Quests, adventures, journeys - these are simply paradigms in which to help your actions carry more weight, and for you to have more fun with them. The real treasure is in realizing that you are indeed special, that everything and everyone is indeed special, and carrying that with you in each moment - especially the ones that don’t seem as if they are at first glance.

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”

— John Steinbeck