I want to do new things, 'for the adventure of being alive'
What's the scariest thing you've tried?
“It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive...”
Yesterday, I joined part of 24-hour writing sprint with the London Writers’ Salon, an amazing community of people who write together on Zoom every day. At the start of each the session, one of the leaders reads out a few words of wisdom, and the above was part of Saturday’s quote. It’s from a poem called The Invitation, by a woman who calls herself Oriah Mountain Dreamer, and I’m taking it as a sign.
Wow, I thought, when I read those words. This is me. This is exactly me, right now. I want to risk looking like a fool for love, for my dreams, for the adventure of being alive. I’m not sure where to start, but I’ll give it a go.
I often get caught up in my thoughts. If I open a book in bed at night, a light switches on in my mind and bam! My thoughts wander, my life’s dreams float to the surface and I find myself having to read the page several times before I can get lost in the text.
I don’t mind being an over-thinker (I like to brand it ‘deep curiosity’) but sometimes it gets too much and I have to somehow find the right key to unlock my subconscious mind and release it like you would a radiator with too much air.
Sometimes my therapist gets my brain dump. Sometimes my friends and family do. But often I find a blank piece of paper and a pencil can help me untangle, either by writing streams of consciousness or something more structured.
I want to find ways to blossom, I want to learn, I want to put myself into situations where I don’t know how I’m going to feel or what the outcome might be.
A few weeks ago, feeling ‘ferrety,’ as my friend C and I call it when our minds race and our moods flatten, I wrote a mind map. I’ve been struggling with the combination of being single, childless/childfree and freelance lately - all of these things can give me an enormous sense of possibility and freedom, but I can also feel frustrated and lonely and I struggle without structure.
So wrote the words ‘mind map’ in the middle of a piece of paper and drew a squiggly cloud shape around it. Spokes came off the cloud with titles like work expansion, family and fun. But the bit I’m most scared of, the part that might make me ‘risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive,’ is the bit I called ‘creativity and connection’.
I want to try things for the joy/adventure/fear of them and be curious about how they turn out.
Under this heading are some random things including F45 (an exhausting type of circuit training), being open to introductions (this relates to asking friends/contacts to suggest suitable dates), swing lessons, salsa (the dance, not the sauce), sport (trying team sports, which are typically my nemesis) and creative writing.
I don’t have a goal for ‘creativity and connection,’ because I don’t want the pressure of doing these things solely because I want to land a freelance contract or find a partner.
I want to find ways to blossom, I want to learn, I want to put myself into situations where I don’t know how I’m going to feel or what the outcome might be. I want to try things for the joy/adventure/fear of them and be curious about how they turn out.
I also want to understand myself and other humans. I’d like to know why routine is so attractive for some people, and novelty is beloved by others - and I want to know how I can find the balance.
Alongside the freelance-single-no kids-unstructured life thing, there is another layer. Age.
I’d like to know: when did you last try something new, and how did it go?
I sometimes whang on about mine (46.5), and I wonder if mid life is one of the hardest times to try new stuff (do you agree?).
At an event organised by The University of Birmingham (from which I graduated in 2000) this week, I met Gareth Neame, the creator/executive producer of TV series Downton Abbey and a Birmingham alumnus. In a speech, he said the film and TV industry had loads of opportunities for young people, which was encouraging.
Afterwards, I asked him ‘and what about ‘old’ people’? His answer was ‘you’re not old,’ but he said he wasn’t aware of older people getting into the industry via entry level jobs or by doing work experience.
I’m not saying I want to become the lead actor in Neame’s next drama, but I do want to try out being an extra, seeing if I can be a mid-life model or do voiceover work.
My ‘creativity and connections’ list isn’t all that challenging or scary, and I’m doing or have tried many of them already. So I want to take it up a notch.
This might be by asking the volleyball players in my local park whether they’re open to newbies (eek, I saw them yesterday and was too scared to approach), by signing up to a rounders team or by simply saying ‘yes’ to doing something new when my bottom would rather be on the sofa. Or it could be becoming a nightclub dancer for a night (I would love to do this!), or learning to DJ and doing a set somewhere. I’d like to volunteer, and maybe mentoring would be something useful I can do.
Maybe I need a bit of structure around this new-ness, by trying a new thing every fortnight, or allowing my new actions to be small (saying ‘hello’ to the handsome man walking his dog, for example).
I recently spoke with a contact who is trying something new workwise. This person has always struck me as being very confident, well-connected and highly articulate. But halfway through our conversation, he said he’d been feeling ‘75% terror’ about the new thing. This was a flash of honesty that really touched me, and I’m grateful for his humanity, as it made me appreciate mine.
So, I’d like to know: when did you last try something new, and how did it go? Did you feel the adventure of being alive? Were you scared? Let me know in the comments!
Some other stuff I’ve written that relates to this:
No kids must mean I’m so productive, right?
This is what life is like without kids
Hello Lucy, in 1994 at the age of 44 I was recently divorced, redundant from my job in the mining industry and without much of a support network or family, living in North Queensland. I signed up for a four year behavioural science degree. I was the oldest undergrad in the faculty. It was a scary time during which I had to reinvent my life and identity. It was a transformative period of growth and learning and in a very real sense my life began anew. Meeting new challenges and taking risks has always paid handsome dividends and I've been blessed with opportunities to work in some very interesting places and meet a lot of wonderful people. I'm 74 this year and the adventure continues. Sometimes we just need to get out of our comfort zone. A comment I see echoed below. Good luck.
Loved reading this Lucy; I’ve been doing this in lots of small ways in recent months - I do get quite high from meeting new people and trying new things, but it never stops being scary in the lead up! Think I tend to get close to the moment of approach and kind of dissociate to get myself into the doing and then I've never regretted it - even if the learning is just about not doing that thing again 😂 Just about to get our swing dancing tickets 😎