Adventures.
Big ones, small ones, weird ones… all kinds of adventures!
This might be a little basic of me and you can absolutely roll your eyes at how oversaid this quote is. I fell in love with this Mark Twain quote in my early twenties, around the time of my first pheonix rising (burn your life and rise anew from the ashes), this quote spoke to my new purpose.
Description: Mark Twain quote, “20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” in white text against a teal blue ocean image. There's a small corner of cliff rock on the upper left.
I think I’ve done a pretty good job of living up to the explorer purpose, the adventurer manifest. It’s easy to point at the big adventures, the trips where we dug out our big backpacks and travelled in new exciting countries. Those take planning and saving, those are amazing adventures but if that is it then it’s not enough. How boring the in between becomes!
I like to call most things an adventure:
a new job
becoming parents
getting a dog
going for a hike
taking a Mexican pottery workshop
a weekend getaway
checking out a quirky museum
All adventures!
They’re just different kinds of exploring and experimenting — the two key ingredients of adventures. Some take longer than others, they usually push you out of your comfort zone, and they might change you / might not. They are big, small, quirky, funny, wholesome, they are new experiences, all of them.
MAKE A WONDERLIST FOR ANYDAY ADVENTURES
Wanderlust with an “a” means to explore the world. Wonderlust with an “o” means to explore your curiosity (yes, I just made up this awesome pun). 😍
When we lived on the island, we stopped exploring, even within the context of the island. The island has an event going on nearly every week from April to October. There are so many cool festivals. When you’re married to The Sailor (and maybe this extends to all born and raised Terschellingers) the refrain is often, “I’ve already done that, I know what that’s like.” The events aren’t new and exciting anymore. And when he’s not home, I didn’t put my big girl pants on and go it alone either. So we got in a rut. We stopped going on little adventures.
We got bored. I got sad.
I don’t think the Sailor got sad though. He likes routine or sameness, it gives him the feeling of security, stability, and reliability. But he also has a career that takes him to new places and has a certain level of unpredicatability. So it makes sense that the contrast of work and island meets his needs.
With the decision that we wouldn’t be pursuing kids anymore. Our rut needed to stop, we both agreed, this couldn’t be the next 40-50 years of our life.
In Spain, there were so many cool things to do and see. It seemed like come Saturday, we would draw a blank when we thought about what to go, see, and do. So one day, I made a list, I wrote down all the things I could think of in that moment, places, events, workshops, etc. Then I taped it to our fridge and we could add to it and more imoprtantly cross items off when we did them. The Sailor was actually on the ship when the first list went up. When he came home, he soon made his own list and he took it to another level, he was making whole day plans (Brunch + Specific Hike + ???).
It made a big difference! We were having adventures again (since Spain was a big adventure, you might call it, adventures within an adventure 🫨).
Once we came back to the Netherlands and settled into our mainland temporary home, the wonderlist came back. There are so many cool things to explore on the mainland that we haven’t seen. The wonderlist really helps us do and not procrastinate. Below is our current list. The Sailor has now also taken to putting appointments in general on the list 😂 Like all the house hunting houses we visited. The best part, this is our second list since living in Sondel. We finished a whole sheet already.
Description: A letter sized paper with a colourful header that says, "Fun in Sondel" below the header is fun items as a checklist, some of the items are checked off like "Tulip Field" and some are still unchecked like "Puzzle Museum (Joure)."
SATURDAY IS FOR SPONTANEOUS ADVENTURES
Last Saturday, we were going to drive to Amersfoort to pick up some Mexican flower vases we had made at a workshop a couple weeks earlier. But as we headed out, the workshop teacher messaged me that the studio was closed for spring break so we couldn’t pick up our pottery yet. That was poor planning on our part. So we switched gears, we had a list of potential houses we liked and decided to go for a drive and look at these houses and their neighbourhoods before asking for a viewing. See if we like them enough.
We loaded up our route and off we went.
We discovered a house that used to be an old schoolhouse but I didn’t like how close to the village it was. The village itself was cute for a short walk about but not for living.
We discovered a house that is in a village but really that village is just a 2km street. That house was really nice and we thought, yes, let’s ask for a viewing. As we drove out of that village / street towards our next destination, we came acrosss a tulip field 😍.
The wonderlist says, visit Keukenhof, the big bad ass tulip field that tourists go to in the Netherlands and yet we have not visited it (living here for 7 years and counting). This random tulip field in the middle of nowhere, had it’s gate open, there were people taking photos with the tulips, it was open for visitors. We stopped, we took photos, smelled the tulips, and later that night, we checked it off the list.
Image Description: A woman (Michelle) wearing a long purple and pink dress standing in a field of red tulips. The tulips come up to her knees. She has a big smile, her hair in a ponytail and her eyes a little squinty from the sun.
Then we hopped back in the car and drove to the next house to spy on. In the province we live in, there is something called the 11 Fountains and in our adventures we have stumbled upon 3 of the 11. On this day, we found another one. We ended our day with dinner in Franeker, a town we knew about and would consider living in, but actually hadn’t been to. Dinner there meant seeing if we would really like to live there too. Franeker turned out to be a really cool place, with buildings much older than I would have guessed for this place. It has quite a bit of character. And it has one of the eleven fountains. The fountains have been added to our wonderlist because we stumbled on them on our other adventures, now we are making an effort to check them off. See below for the Franeker fountain.
Description: The Oort Cloud Fountain
“The fountain is an ode to the world-famous astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort, who was born in Franeker. His assumption that a ‘cloud’ of billions of comet-like objects is moving around our solar system was a breakthrough in astronomy. The fountain is designed as a series of waterfalls that flow into the water basin from a bowl, along a vertical chain of night-coloured pearls. One of the pearls is silver-coloured, like the colour of the moon, another is gilded, the colour of the sun. ‘The Oort Cloud’ fountain itself is a mist of fine droplets falling from a gold-coloured mesh into the bowl.”
- 11Fountains website
When we left the house Saturday, we didn’t plan to be out of the house exploring for 7 hours, but that’s what happened. At dinner we talked about our life, how we’re feeling about the present and the future. It’s been a tough year and a half, in what has been another occurrence of the pheonix rising, except a dual phoenix. We had months being in the ashes wondering when the spark would be back, when the rebirth would feel ready or done. At dinner, we spoke about how we felt a shift, how life feels really good right now, how our future feels bright.
SMALL ADVENTURES. WONDERLUST. WONDERLISTS.
Reigniting our small adventures didn’t solve our big life questions but it did help us navigate those questions and for me, find myself again. It’s a big part of what was missing before and a big part of what makes our future feel exciting again.
Because exploring, dreaming, and discovering, can happen closer to home.