“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
The adventure life is about living a fitter, stronger, healthier, longer, happier, more adventurous life. It’s not just about getting outside, but getting outside our box and expanding our comfort zone. It’s about facing challenges and overcoming fears that have blocked our path for way too long. The adventure is out there waiting for us, but it is also inside us, deep inside us, and that exploration may be the most important adventure of all.
By seeking to improve ourselves everyday we tell ourselves that we will not be complacent and accept the status quo, we will not follow blindly the path that has been designated for us. But we will embrace change, accept the unknown, endure discomfort, and take a new path, an adventurous one, of our own design.
Your ultimate goal in life is to achieve your own happiness. No one can do this for you. This personal desire is the motivation behind almost every behavior. Moreover, happiness is more emotional and spiritual than it is a matter of acquiring material things.
More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle wrote that the ultimate aim of human life is to be happy. He said that the great question that each of us must answer is, “How shall we live in order to be happy?”
Your ability to answer that question correctly for yourself - and then to follow where your answer leads you - will largely determine whether you achieve your own happiness, and how soon.
In every culture, enjoyable activities have been invented to suit the potentialities of the body. When a normal physical function, like running, is performed in a socially designed, goal-oriented setting with rules that offer challenges and require skills, it turns into a flow activity.
If we can go out a little further, or climb a little higher, or go when it’s a little hotter, or a little colder, or a little wetter, we can step outside our box, leave the crowds behind, and really experience the adventure.
Every research study on aging agrees that lifestyle has a big impact on biology and largely determines your physiological age.
You aren’t old until age becomes your excuse. If you continue to remind yourself of your age and use it as a crutch, no matter what the number is, you’ll come to believe that high achievement is impossible. Just grow old, get fat, and accept that as just the way life is.
You can have that if you want, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You are the master of your own fate, no matter your age. If you refuse to accept age as an excuse for mediocrity, you won’t be mediocre.
“The more you know what you really want, and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. The moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, that’s when the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the social media static start to loom large and become very threatening.” - Alain Boton
“Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”