The Happiness Of Pursuit Part 5

In South Korea I served on a panel with a man who became an entrepreneur at age sixteen. For the next fifteen years he built a series of businesses with many employees. "People laughed at me," he said through a translator. "But they're not laughing now."

Whatever your quest, you must believe!

Life Is Risky

Laura continued her journey from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, eventually logging more than a year at sea before completing the quest as planned. She and I exchanged emails while I was traveling through Asia and she was in her new home in New Zealand, where she was studying to earn her divemaster license. She told me that her greatest challenge was overcoming the objections of her own government in allowing her to pursue the journey. She was also surprised by all the people who chimed in with negative comments after her legal case received worldwide attention. As a result of Laura's journey, Guinness World Records stopped publis.h.i.+ng the achievements of the world's youngest sailors.

Laura's dad was supportive, but plenty of other people weren't. As she wrote me, "I know about sailing. I know what to do if a storm breaks. But people are a mystery that is a lot harder to deal with than high seas."

She complained about what she saw as the Dutch government's overbearing att.i.tude in their attempt to legally prevent her from sailing the world as a teenager. In their defense, however, a spokesperson from the Netherlands Bureau for Youth Care noted that if her journey was unsuccessful-especially if she was harmed or killed en route-people would have complained about her being allowed to leave with no legal challenge. "If Laura had drowned," he said, "we would be accused of not doing enough to protect her. Thank G.o.d she's OK and I think that's partly due to the safety measures we enforced as part of the condition for allowing her to go."

I live in Oregon, near good running trails and mountain climbs that are attempted by thousands of people each year. Some of these climbs are tough, but almost all are completed without harm coming to anyone.

On one recent weekend, however, tragedy struck as three hikers were killed in an unusual accident. Despite the fact that all the climbers were experienced and had left for the hike when weather conditions were good, some observers blamed the accident on "risky behavior" and suggested various reforms that wouldn't have made any difference in this case.

Both of these responses-to Laura's journey and to the Oregon tragedy-are based on the outcome of the situation. The outside world judges our actions based almost entirely on results-even though the results aren't always up to us.

When I visited the Iranian territory of Kish Island, I came in on a flight from Dubai. Almost everyone else on the plane was a migrant worker seeking to renew their eligibility for work in Dubai. I was the only Westerner, and the supervisor pulled me out of the immigration line and into a small office. "Wait here," he said, then disappeared with my pa.s.sport for at least twenty minutes.

I began to worry. Even though Kish Island is a visa-free zone, meaning that anyone should be able to visit, at the time relations between Iran and the United States were terribly strained. While I was there, three other Americans were imprisoned on the Iranian mainland on charges of trespa.s.sing even as their families denied any offense.

The supervisor came back with another official. "Fingerprints," the new official said matter-of-factly as he produced an ink pad. I kept smiling and made vague remarks about how excited I was to visit Kish Island. He asked a few questions about my occupation, another tricky topic since I didn't want to mention I was a writer. (In many countries, "writer" means "journalist," and journalists are treated with suspicion in places without a free press.) I told him I was a small-business owner and publisher, a true statement that also seemed generic enough to avoid further questioning. Finally he said the magic words: "OK, here is your pa.s.sport. Permission has been granted to enter."

I'd made it to Iran! Just as important, I made it out safely when the time came to return to Dubai. But what if I hadn't? What if I'd been detained or even imprisoned, like those three other Americans? I have no doubt that some of my friends and readers around the world would have been concerned and saddened. But I'm also pretty sure that others would have said, "What was he thinking? That was stupid!"

Sailing the world alone, climbing mountains, or visiting Iran as a citizen of the country that the Iranian government calls "the great Satan" all involve risks. In the end these pursuits will be judged on the outcome. Consider it like this: WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT AN ADVENTURE OR QUEST THAT INVOLVES PERCEIVED RISK:.

Successful Outcome: brave, courageous, confident Failed Outcome: stupid, risky, naive, arrogant Judgments about whether a quest is brave or stupid tend to be relative. While authorities can play a role in setting conditions for a quest that serve to protect the fearless from themselves, ultimately a.s.sessments of a quest's worthiness depend on the result. Sometimes life itself is risky. There are few goals worth pursuing that are totally risk free.

Chris McCandless gained fame and notoriety for his attempt to live off the land in Alaska-an attempt that ultimately led to his untimely death. But McCandless wasn't trying to be famous, and he didn't plan on dying. He was searching within himself for something that was hard to define. Before his death, he wrote a letter that was later quoted by Jon Krakauer in the book Into the Wild. The excerpt below has inspired many people to rethink their lives and routines.

I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circ.u.mstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his pa.s.sion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

The cause of McCandless's death remained unknown for years afterward. In Into the Wild, Krakauer speculated that he'd died from slow poisoning after eating toxic potato seeds. This theory was criticized on the grounds that the seeds weren't poisonous, and the commonly accepted premise that McCandless had intended to commit suicide. Krakauer felt strongly that this wasn't the case-McCandless "wanted to test himself, not to kill himself," he said-but for more than fifteen years he didn't have proof.

Proof arrived in the form of new evidence. Another writer, working with a lab at Indiana University, surmised that the potato seeds in question weren't always toxic, but for someone who was weak and emaciated, they would be. Krakauer had this hypothesis checked with independent labs that tested the same kinds of seeds that Chris McCandless had recorded eating in his journal. The hypothesis was confirmed and the mystery solved: McCandless made a mistake when he ate the wrong seeds, but he wasn't reckless and self-destructive as the critics had claimed.

It was a risk for Bryon to quit his job and pursue a new career focused on ultrarunning, a sport not known for its lucrative commercialization. But Bryon knew that the real risk was to stay in one place. He chose the safe path, the one that led to the trail and nearly one hundred races each year.

Jia learned to take small risks every day by asking restaurants if he could cook his own meals and asking police officers if he could sit in their cruisers. At first it was hard to make even these small requests, but he grew to enjoy it as he went along.

It was an even bigger risk for Laura to sail solo around the world, relying on her own judgment to handle the difficult conditions that were nearly certain to arrive. But as she said, she had to do it for herself. After the epic journey was complete, she moved to New Zealand, the land of her birth, and began studying for her divemaster license. After spending most of her life on the water, she wasn't ready to change.

Remember You have to believe in your quest even if others don't.

We tend to judge risk based on outcome-but the outcome isn't always up to us.

Life itself is risky. Choose your own risk level.

1Jason: "Your comfort zone may be more like a cage you can't escape from than a safe place you can retreat to."

2 "My faith in humanity is restored!" wrote a commenter who saw the video. "I hope she got promoted," someone else said.

3 Free training tip: If you're trying to run progressively longer distances, all you need to do is run halfway in one direction. One way or another, you have to get back!

Chapter 6.

Everyday Adventure

Do one thing every day that scares you.

-ELEANOR ROOSEVELT Lesson: YOU CAN HAVE THE LIFE YOU WANT NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE.

What if you're not ready to take seventeen years off and walk everywhere? Not up for running hundreds of marathons in a single year, or sailing across the ocean on your own?

Relax. Or don't relax, because a quest is rarely about taking it easy. It's about challenging yourself however you can, learning new things and exploring horizons outside your environment ... even if you never leave home.

You can do this no matter where you live and no matter how old you are. If you want to make every day an adventure, all you have to do is prioritize adventure. It has to become more important than routine.

Every Country, Prepared on Your Plate

Tulsa, Oklahoma, isn't exactly known as a mecca for gastronomy. When I came through on a book tour, I had a hard time finding a restaurant that wasn't part of a big American chain. Ordering coffee at the bookstore cafe, I had to explain the difference between whole milk and skim milk to the barista ... and then she charged me extra to subst.i.tute my preference.

Yet underneath the highway exit surface of Outback Steakhouse, Taco Bell, and your choice of hamburger joints, there are a lot of different people living in Tulsa. Like most other U.S. cities, Tulsa is becoming more diverse. Significant populations from more than fifty countries now call the area home, including immigrants from such faraway locales as Burma, China, and the Pacific Islands. The oil industry, long Tulsa's most reliable means of employment, has s.h.i.+fted to accommodate several aeros.p.a.ce and financial firms that have set up shop. The result is a diverse influx of workers from the rest of the country and overseas.

At the same time that the city was slowly enriching its demography, thirty-three-year-old Sasha Martin was changing some long-ingrained habits in her family. Three years earlier, she'd been like many others searching for a focus before settling on a quest. Her daughter Ava was six months old, and Sasha felt firmly entrenched in Oklahoma life-perhaps too much so.

Sasha had grown up overseas with a foster parent who was stationed in Europe as a financial director. When she was younger, it was no big deal to hop over to Greece for a weekend, or to visit Scandinavia on holiday. Now that she was living in Oklahoma with a child of her own, the opportunities to see the world were much more limited.

The Big Idea she settled on was to embrace culture through cuisine. "Stovetop Travel" was Sasha's project to introduce meals from around the world into her home kitchen. If it sounds simple, understand that this was no "buy a wok and learn to make stir-fry" weeklong task. Sasha had earned a culinary arts degree after returning to the United States as a young adult, and she was determined to put her education to work. The cooking project would last nearly four years and be truly global. Every good goal has a deadline (Pay attention: This is a recurring theme of many stories), and Sasha chose to cook an entire meal from each country's cuisine every week, following the alphabet in AZ fas.h.i.+on for a total of 195 weeks.1 She began with Afghanistan, steaming up basmati rice and learning how to make sabse borani, a spinach and yogurt dip. Next was Albania, featuring dishes such as turli perimesh, a selection of mixed vegetables. For each week's meal, Sasha conducted detailed research, checking cookbooks and online recipes, and consulting a growing group of online friends who followed her progress as she moved from Angola through Brunei. Each meal was complete, with at least one main course (sometimes several) and a generous serving of starters and side dishes. Whenever possible, Sasha would play music from the country she was featuring, and invite friends to join the dinner.

How did this go over at home? Well, it took some time. At first, Sasha's husband, Keith, wasn't thrilled about the idea. A self-described picky eater, Keith would have been happy eating hamburgers and french fries every day for the rest of his life. Before meeting Sasha, he'd never seen an eggplant or tried fresh spinach.

Fortunately, Keith agreed to be supportive, and even helped doc.u.ment the process through photography. As one week's menu gave way to the next and Ava grew, he created a regular video feature in which he filmed her impressions of each country's food.

After Sasha finished the "A" countries (Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, and so forth) and moved on to the Bs, she was sitting one day at her dining room table, thumbing through cookbooks in search of what to make for Bulgaria. A knock sounded at the door, and a young man appeared who was selling children's books for a summer job. The young man had an accent and happened to be from Bulgaria. Sasha invited him in and quizzed him on the recipes she was studying. (To thank him, she bought a book before he left.) A similar thing happened with Finland. Sasha was at a children's play group and met a Finnish woman who ended up following her home to help make pulla, a sweet bread made with cardamom and raisins.

When she started the project, Sasha's initial motivations were to improve the family's diet and get out of a rut. Missing the travel experiences of her youth, she hoped to rekindle a sense of foreign connection by dicing peppers and baking pastries. But the message ran deeper. Sasha longed to facilitate a peace offering of people breaking bread together and understanding different cultures.

Three years into the project, her vision had expanded. She was asked to give talks at schools and other forums. Her project was being replicated elsewhere, by other families who embraced the idea of learning to understand culture through food. In fact, she was preparing for a collective dining experience called the Two-Hundred-Foot Table. "I expected the adventure to change our eating habits," Sasha wrote me in an email, "but I didn't expect it to affect all other aspects of my life the way it has."

Meanwhile, Ava's first solid food was Afghan chicken. By three years old, she was equally comfortable using silverware or chopsticks. Before her fifth birthday she will have tried food from every country in the world.

The Recipe for an Everyday Quest

I liked Sasha's story because it ill.u.s.trates adventure and ingenuity. She drew on a love for foreign travel and added in her degree in culinary arts. Not only that, but she didn't just decide to "cook a bunch of different meals"-she made it a quest, with a clear goal and a defined set of milestones.

What was special about Sasha's cooking project? Why couldn't she just "make foreign food" once in a while, instead of taking on the task of preparing unique meals from every country?

Sasha's project was bigger because it was a quest. She chose something specific to work on over time-an endeavor that was fun, challenging, and meaningful. Recall the characteristics of quests that we examined earlier: A clear goal. In the case of Sasha's project (and mine!), there are a set, limited number of countries. I planned to visit each, and Sasha planned to research and prepare a full meal from each. It would be a lot of work, but both of us knew what we were working toward and how success would be defined.

Measurable progress. Sasha and her family were able to see how far along they were each week. In addition to conducting a countdown, every week they'd color in another country on a map that hung in the dining room. Even though they weren't hurrying things along, it was fun to see how far they'd come. They could also look ahead to future country "visits," something that created antic.i.p.ation for each week's meal.

A sense of calling or mission. Sasha deployed her culinary skills for a purpose that went beyond making a red wine reduction or knowing the difference between sweet potatoes and yams. The whole point was to be a part of the world beyond Oklahoma. Yearning for the life she had known as a child, she found a way to bring it to the table. Later, the vision expanded: She began speaking in cla.s.srooms and community centers. The goal was to spread a message of peace through understanding different cultures.

Sacrifice ... or at least effort. Did Sasha's quest require sacrifice? Perhaps not-at least as long as you don't count the adjustments that Keith went through as he learned to expand his palate. But it certainly involved concentrated effort over time. Having chosen to follow an AZ country-by-country order, Sasha couldn't mix it up too much. If she entered a rut or encountered a series of countries that were hard to plan for, she had to figure it out. No excuses!

Other Everyday Adventures

In researching this book, I heard from people who'd undertaken all sorts of quests like Sasha's-visiting, either figuratively or literally, a large number of locations. Marc Ankenbauer, a self-proclaimed "Glacial Explorer," devoted nearly ten years to jumping into every lake in the Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks. These parks contain 168 lakes in total, many requiring off-trail hiking through dense vegetation and rough mountainous terrain to reach, and including land on both sides of the U.S.Canada border. Marc had the idea to challenge his fitness level and raise money for Camp Mak-A-Dream, a charity that offers free outdoor experiences for children and teens living with cancer.

A couple of my other favorite projects in this broad category involved tracking down special buildings through a series of field trips that increased in distance as the project developed.

Case Number One: Every Basilica A former atheist, Allie Terrell converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-three after reading a book by C. S. Lewis. When Allie was looking for a church to attend, a Google search directed her to a basilica-a word she'd heard before but wasn't entirely familiar with. Further research revealed that a basilica was a special kind of church building, and at the time there were sixty-eight in the United States.

Allie was interested in why some churches had received special status. There was a church on every corner in her home state of Wisconsin, but you had to go out of your way to find a basilica. After visiting one, Allie and her boyfriend Jason were intrigued. Basilicas tended to have special architectural features, often maintaining a sense of unity with earlier church building design but other times giving a nod to contemporary style. Some were particularly beautiful, and others had become pilgrimage sites for historical reasons. Allie and Jason decided to turn it into a project: They'd visit every basilica in the United States, telling the story along the way.

Allie is a computer scientist by day, and naturally skilled with managing information. Most of these historical buildings have very little online doc.u.mentation. Many Catholics don't even know what a basilica is, and the elderly caretakers of the buildings tend not to spend their time editing Wikipedia articles. When Jason and Allie noticed this knowledge gap, they decided to fill it by doc.u.menting their experiences through photography and narratives.

The quest has expanded geographically to the point that they are now starting to travel further from their home base in Wisconsin. One challenge: The number of basilicas increases over time as church leaders bestow the special status on more buildings. Allie and Jason plan to deal with this obstacle by "freezing the design" at some point and focusing on the ones that have been recognized as of that moment.

Case Number Two: Every Baseball Stadium At the age of five, Josh Jackson partic.i.p.ated in a ritual familiar to many children. His dad took him to a big sports stadium for the first time. In Josh's case, the stadium was the Houston Astrodome, and the game was Major League Baseball. Perhaps it was the sense of experiencing an important rite of pa.s.sage, or maybe it was just the box of Cracker Jacks that came with a free prize at the bottom, but whatever it was, Josh was enthralled.

For the rest of his childhood, then continuing fifteen years into adulthood, Josh and his dad have been trying to visit every Major League stadium in the United States and Canada. In the early days, they saved money by packing peanut-b.u.t.ter-and-jelly sandwiches for meals and sleeping in the back of a Ford Econoline van while on trips to faraway stadiums in the Midwest.

Josh wrote to me about the magic of walking into a big stadium for the first time, emerging from the top of a tunnel and into an instant community of fellow sports fans: "I wanted to experience that glorious walk in every other stadium. There's still nothing quite like that walk, when you enter into a tunnel and come out into a new stadium for the first time, seeing the players running drills and the stands filling with people."

After that first visit, Josh and his dad began to take regular road trips. One summer, his dad sprung a surprise. "How about we go to ... New York City?" he said with a smile. Josh was thrilled, but that wasn't the surprise.

"How do you think we should get there?" his dad continued.

Josh was confused. "Um, in the car?"

That's when his dad dropped the real surprise with another smile. "How about we hitchhike?"

Josh told me the rest of the story in an email: A few months later my mother and three sisters dropped us off at a truck stop a few miles from our house and few hours later we were on our way. All said and done, we hitchhiked 1,300 miles over the course of ten days. We received twenty-two rides in total and our journey took us from West Michigan to see games in Pittsburgh, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. The most memorable ride was in the back of a pick-up truck, my dad and I sitting on either side of a Harley Davidson, from Eastern Pennsylvania straight into New York City via the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge. Spending time with my dad-watching him lead us, watching him interact with others through conversations in the hot sun and on Interstate ramps, making signs and experiencing the freedom and fear of hitchhiking-these moments ... were certainly the most meaningful to me.

Walking into the Astrodome had initiated a love of baseball, and hitchhiking to New York City cemented the idea that this would be a lifelong project. As Josh grew up, he planned to see a game in every Major League Baseball stadium. It's been an on-again, off-again project for much of his life, and he now has just a few remaining stadiums to hit.

Life as an Experiment in Bravery

I first learned the concept of life experiments from Allan Bacon several years ago. Allan was a normal guy with a good life and a great family, but he felt a vague sense of discontent-much like many other people I hear from. Allan couldn't abandon it all and move to a life of backpacking around the world, and he wasn't keen on running a marathon every Sunday. But he began changing his routine however he could, on the theory that even a small degree of change would be beneficial. Since he began his initial life experiments, which were as simple as visiting the art museum on his lunch break or taking a photography cla.s.s, he's been much happier.

In a short book, The Flinch, Julien Smith wrote about his own series of life experiments, challenging readers to give some a try. One of my favorite pa.s.sages involves a deliberate act of household destruction: Go to the kitchen and grab a mug you don't like. Mug in hand, go to a place in your house with a hard floor. Hold the mug in front of you, in your outstretched hand. Say good-bye to it. Now, drop the cup. Whatever rationalization you're using right now is a weak spot for you. Flag it. You'll see it again and again. Drop the d.a.m.n cup. Did you do it? If so, you'll notice one thing: breaking your programming requires a single moment of strength.

Aside from smas.h.i.+ng mugs in your kitchen, what other kinds of life experiments can shake things up for the better? Here's a quick list of possibilities.