Threads on the spirit of adventure
Faith and a full life are expressed in a spirit of joyful risk-taking and adventure, not by fearfully playing it safe.
This type of post is something I’m calling “Threads.” These are going to be short posts that share relatively undeveloped thoughts - they might consist of a quote (or two, or three), or kernels of ideas that have been bouncing around in my head.
As readers, you have a choice as to how you interact with these posts - you can simply let them nestle in your consciousness as nuggets of insight, or you can “pull on the thread” (either by mulling them over further, asking related questions, or by going to the source of the quote and investigating) and go a ways down the rabbit hole to which they lead.
Feel free to share your own mullings-over in the comments for my and other readers’ benefit!
The poem “Youth,” by Samuel Ullman:
Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young. When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.
Jordan Peterson [JBP] and Os Guinness [OG] on the spirit of faith, in this roundtable discussion on Exodus 1 and 2:
[JBP]: “…in some real sense, God - at least how God is represented in the Old Testament - is definitely the spirit on the side of the adventurous, for better or for worse…Whatever God’s goodness is, it’s not some simple, harmless, all-encompassing, weak compassion - it’s something terrifying in its moral breadth. It would really be something if the spirit of God is on the side of the rampantly adventurous….Abraham is an adventurer. Moses is an adventurer. Noah’s an adventurer…David’s an adventurer. They were not people who stayed home and tried to never cause any trouble.”
[OG]: “Well faith is adventure. It’s entrepreneurial. People of faith are those I call ‘the entrepreneurs of life.’…There’s a vision, there’s adventure, there’s risk, there’s a cost…the whole thing is wrapped up in that.”
The whole 2+ hour-long discussion is fascinating, if you have the time and inclination to watch the whole thing.
Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments which quote resonated with you, and why. And feel free to pull on these “threads” and go down the rabbit hole to which they lead!