Understanding Athelind's Argot: "It's an ADVENTURE!"
Your Obedient Serpent has traveled a lot in his life. Throughout his high school years, his family lived in a motor home, and would take any excuse to pull up stakes and hit the road for a weekend or a week or a month, however long we could get away from work and school.
Needless to say, in those days when the TLA for "map" was "AAA" rather than "GPS", our navigation was not always perfect.
We were never lost, though. Whenever we took an unanticipated turn, whenever the highway underscored Dr. Korzybski's adage that "the map is not the territory", whenever our best-laid plans gang agly ... my mother or my sister or I would say, in a voice full of deliberately-synthetic cheer:
It's an adventure!
And it was. New vistas, unexpected discoveries, experiences that we'd never have had if we'd stayed in the Comfort Zone of interstate highways and Good Sam Parks.
It was an adventure. Every wrong turn, every misread map. Never lost, always seeking.
And those words, that rule that we were never allowed to say "lost"-it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It became an adventure.
This is a metaphor that extends past the road.
A friend of mine, a good friend who's been there through my own recent fumblings with life's map, is about to head off into new territory. His life has taken some unanticipated turns lately, and he's been stuck by the side of the road, unsure where he's going.
He's moving, now. Moving away, alas, but in motion, heading out on the highway. It's not any place he ever anticipated he'd be headed, but it looks like it's full of possibility and potential that just hasn't been available here, in his Comfort Zone.
It's an Adventure.
And, despite the stress behind the move, despite the sorrow that he'll no longer be local ... it is just so cool that he's got this opportunity, this adventure ahead of him.
I'm sad that he's going, but I'm excited for him.
Needless to say, in those days when the TLA for "map" was "AAA" rather than "GPS", our navigation was not always perfect.
We were never lost, though. Whenever we took an unanticipated turn, whenever the highway underscored Dr. Korzybski's adage that "the map is not the territory", whenever our best-laid plans gang agly ... my mother or my sister or I would say, in a voice full of deliberately-synthetic cheer:
It's an adventure!
And it was. New vistas, unexpected discoveries, experiences that we'd never have had if we'd stayed in the Comfort Zone of interstate highways and Good Sam Parks.
It was an adventure. Every wrong turn, every misread map. Never lost, always seeking.
And those words, that rule that we were never allowed to say "lost"-it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It became an adventure.
This is a metaphor that extends past the road.
A friend of mine, a good friend who's been there through my own recent fumblings with life's map, is about to head off into new territory. His life has taken some unanticipated turns lately, and he's been stuck by the side of the road, unsure where he's going.
He's moving, now. Moving away, alas, but in motion, heading out on the highway. It's not any place he ever anticipated he'd be headed, but it looks like it's full of possibility and potential that just hasn't been available here, in his Comfort Zone.
It's an Adventure.
And, despite the stress behind the move, despite the sorrow that he'll no longer be local ... it is just so cool that he's got this opportunity, this adventure ahead of him.
I'm sad that he's going, but I'm excited for him.