Stretching the Adventure Muscles

Creative reflections from a backpacking trip

Papercut by Anna Brones, 2023

Creative Fuel is a newsletter about the intersection of creativity and everyday life. If it’s your first time here: welcome! The main newsletter installments drop on the first and third Friday of the month. Paid subscribers also get a weekly creative prompt, sent on Saturdays… it’s kind of like pulling a creative prompt card every weekend. If that sounds like fun, or you just want to help to make this work sustainable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

We have an hour until the outgoing tide makes the headland passable. For now the agitated waves splash up against the rocky outcropping, sending white froth high up into the air above. In just a few hours time, the water will recede and tide pools will appear—what’s left of the salty brine will sit serenely in the sun, moving only when a gentle breeze dances above, causing tiny ripples to scatter across the surface.

All that’s to be done with the hour is to wait. Which means there’s time for another cup of coffee. Time to play another round of analog Wordle¹. Time to take the binoculars out in the hopes that the sea otter who was playing in the waves last night has come back for a morning show.

It’s not so much an hour to sit and wait, it’s an hour to sit and be.

As I sit there on the beach, I think about how expansive time can feel when you cut out all the “usual” stuff. The emails, the notifications, the to-do lists. How easily at home this hour could fill with all those little bits of modern, digital life—tiny moments of scrolling and consuming that quickly add up, making you wonder where in the world that time went, feeling like it evaporated into the ether.

***

I went on a five-day backpacking trip on the coast this past weekend. I hadn’t been on a backpacking trip for almost two years, so the lead up felt a bit frantic. Making sure the water filter still worked, fitting things into stuff sacks, printing the tide table and putting it in a Ziploc bag for safe keeping, digging in my mind for my go-to meals and snacks that don’t require ingredients that are *too* heavy. For the record, my food policy on trips like this could be defined as “maximalist light.” I will always be the one with a few blocks of cheese.

Preparing for that trip, I was conscious of an underlying sense of agitation and slight anxiety. Some mixture of thinking that something would be forgotten, of questioning whether I was in good enough shape to scramble over rocks with a loaded pack, of wondering if I had finished all the work things I needed to do.

Of course once the door to the house is locked and you’re in the car on your way to the trailhead, a lot of that subsides. If you’ve forgotten something, you’ll figure it out. If you missed a work thing, well, you’re not a neurosurgeon or a firefighter, no one’s life is depending on whether you sent an email or not. And your physical capabilities? All you can do is listen to your body, put one foot in front of the other.

I’ve noticed a shift lately: I’m not as adventurous as I used to be. Or at least, I don’t feel like I am.

I think is partially fueled by the scaling back required during the past few years of a global pandemic, and also partially fueled by age. I think back to my 20-year-old self who led a bunch of teens on all kinds of backpacking trips for a summer without any of those twinges of anxiety or questioning. Either I’ve forgotten them, or I was young enough to be fueled by that glorious naïveté that comes with youth. Or I was too busy dealing with things like the teenage boy who refused to change his socks the entire trip even though it rained every day. Or the girl who needed help to work through her anxiety of getting over a steep coastal headland with the help of a scraggly piece of rope, my main focus aimed at ensuring her fear of heights didn’t cause her to freeze up midway, perhaps preventing me from questioning my own emotions.

Two decades later things feel different.

“I’m realizing my adventure muscles have not been used very much in the last few years,” I texted a couple of girlfriends from the car.

“Stretch ‘em out!” was the response.

I wonder how many of us feel this way? A little less intrepid. A little more removed. A little more nervous. A little more hesitant.

We don’t say yes to social engagements as quickly as we used to. We know fun activities will be good for us, but sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation to get ourselves there. We wonder where some of the sparkle of that 20-something energy disappeared to, when things felt more alive, more potent. Or even some of that childlike sense of wonder and amazement in simple activities that can enthrall us for endless amounts of time, like the two kids camped down the beach from us who spent hours building a sand castle/moat construction in anticipation that the high tide would fill it.

By nature, I am not an adrenaline seeker, so I was never going to be doing incredible mountain summits, or pushing my body to its absolute extremes, but I have always craved being the kind of person who does things outside, who is able to go backpacking, who is happy to skip out on modern conveniences for awhile (not the coffee of course).

What I am coming to learn with age, is that this desire stems more from a need to exist in moments of presence than it does to abide by a checklist. Keeping my adventure muscles in use means keeping them strong enough to put me into those more wild moments where I feel like myself. It’s finding a way to tap back into that potency of younger days. A way to play for the sake of playing.

Have coffee making gear and art supplies, will travel.

Our backpacking trip was an out-and-back, and I kept thinking about how a trip of that nature is one entirely about process. There’s no loop to complete, to mileage to accomplish. It’s an adventure of being in the moment. Listening to the eagles. Spotting the sea otter. Finding rocks with smooth holes carved out of them. Watching the tide ebb and flow. Making a second coffee. Discovering whale bones. Doing a drawing. Sitting and staring out over an ocean, contemplating how wild it is to sit at the edge of a continent.

We spend so much of our lives focused on goals and outcomes, but this is not that. There’s no summit, no checklist, no tracking, no time. There is only the tide, the wind, the water, the sky, the plants, the animals, the place.

***

Adventure muscles aren’t just there to get us to the top of something, or to ensure that we do something the fastest, or that we trek to the farthest corner of the world. They’re also there to remind us that we need challenges every day, that there’s always some element of the unknown if we’re willing to step into it.

Adventure muscles can be used on big and small scales. They keep us agile.

There’s a wildness that we can find even in the most well-known, routine of places. But that too requires some adventure muscles, and we have to start by asking if we’ve become complacent in our routines, if the everydayness of life has blurred the edges a bit. If the answer is yes, the response is: it’s time to stretch ‘em out.

We stretch them by creating. We stretch them by paying attention. We stretch them by reading and learning. We stretch them by staying curious. We stretch them by moving. We stretch them by seeking out moments of awe. We stretch them by connecting. We stretch them by putting ourselves just a touch outside of our comfort zones.

***

In the car on the way home my husband asked how I was feeling.

“I feel like I got my brain back,” I said.

We can’t always reset like this. But on some level, as creative human beings, we have to work at finding smaller doses of that kind of reset on a more regular basis.

Since coming back I’ve been thinking about how to create some of that space, expansiveness, and reset on a smaller, more regular level. What are the daily activities that put my mind in that headspace? What makes me feel present when distractions abound?

In our modern-day culture, multiple days offline feels like a luxury. But I would counter and say that feeling makes it all the more essential (like the Zen proverb, “you should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you're too busy, then you should sit for an hour”).

We all need doses of time and space to think, reflect, and connect.

We need the moments to look at the plants in our backyard. The moments to be amazed at the way a cloud travels across the sky. The moments to listen to a conversation without stopping midway to check something on our phone. The moments to be together and laugh until we feel it in our whole body. The moments to dream. The moments to play. The moments for our minds to wander.

Not because those moments make us more creative, or more productive, but because those moments make us who we are.

---

A LITTLE CREATIVE INSPIRATION + OTHER TIDBITS

• I guess this whole newsletter is mostly about being offline, so I guess my main dose of creative inspiration for you is to say: the creative inspiration is whatever is outside your window!

• This backpacking trip started and ended at the trailhead at Rialto Beach in Olympic National Park, which sits just north of the Quileute Tribe's home of La Push. In doing some research after I came back from the trip, I found this Quileute Alphabet sheet, which has beautiful illustrations and a little introduction to the Quileute language.

• My friend Brendan has been doing a fun pop-up newsletter featuring excerpts from his new book Make It and it has been nice to read every morning.

• “Even on the darkest days, the sun illuminates our lives—all who can need only look lovingly at the commonplace.” I am always inspired by Lucia Eames.

---

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

Virtual: I’m teaching a virtual workshop on Friday June 9 with Case for Making that’s devoted to papercuts AND watercolor. Tickets + info.

Seattle: Two in-person workshops in Seattle this month, one at the Nordic Museum on Saturday June 10 and another one with Tilth Alliance on June 17.

---

SUPPORT

Thank you so much for being here and supporting my work. Other ways to support: buy something my shop, buy one of my books, come to a Creative Fuel workshop or free Wednesday session, or send this newsletter to someone who you think might enjoy it.

1. ANALOG WORDLE

I think this is pretty self explanatory, and I am quite certain plenty of other people have played this and many other analog word games so this isn’t some ground-breaking activity. But if you want to play…

Decide on a symbol for a letter that’s in the correct place (we used a square), and a different symbol for a letter that’s in the word but not in the right place (we used a circle). Or go wild and use green and yellow watercolors or markers.

Choose a five letter word. Make the other player guess the word by writing their word down. Use your pre-determined symbols to identify what letters are and aren’t in the word. Keep playing until they get the word.

Repeat and play again until some other great analog activity presents itself.