Thanks for visiting my blog. I’m documenting my quest to have 60 adventures - one a week for 60 weeks - leading to my 60th birthday. Enjoy!
Laughter really is a tonic. And in an improv class, you’re guaranteed to laugh. A lot.
You’d laugh if you saw me with Nico, an Improv classmate, pretending we were in a library discussing the merits of self-help books. You might laugh at me rather than with me, but you’d definitely laugh.
Snowboarders look so cool surfing down the slope, effortlessly shifting their weight to turn one way and then the other. I used to ski; surely the skills transfer. How hard could it be?
Hard. Very, very hard.
Who doesn’t love to sing?
For me, though, singing holds both pleasure and pain. When I’m alone or with my kids, I sing my heart out, despite their rolled eyes and cries of “Mom, please!” Around other people I rein in my cringe-worthy voice.
Although you’d never know it to look at my messy house, I like precision. Only detail-oriented people like me find it satisfying to edit, for example - to think of the most fitting word and to review for grammar and punctuation. Ditto for sewing, where attention to detail means the difference between clean seams and a clearly home-made look. So no surprise that I found mosaic-making fun and relaxing.
Dog people will understand the joy of hanging around with 15 gorgeous, friendly Huskie mixes. Aside from the experience of spending the day outdoors in a beautiful setting and the feeling of having these furry athletes pull you along a snow-packed trail, I wanted to go dogsledding so I could meet the dogs. Nothing quite equals the feeling of saying hello to one of these beauties and having her hug (yes, hug!) you.
As a clutzy and uncoordinated kid, I hated gym. I couldn’t run fast, throw a ball straight, or make a basket. Ever. One thing I could do, though, was shimmy up the ropes to the top of the gym and touch the ceiling. It felt great to master an activity that some more physically gifted kids found challenging.
As a clutzy and uncoordinated adult, I wasn’t sure I wanted to try rock climbing. My flying-up-the-ropes days lived in the nether regions of my memory, and the thought of scaling walls up to 50 feet high seemed intimidating.
Still, this adventure quest beckoned, so there I stood at Brooklyn Boulders in Somerville, MA, harness on, ropes attached, staring straight up and repeating silently to myself, “You can do this, you can do this …”
Back in the day, dancing with a partner meant “slow dancing.” We’d either rock to the Stones (or later, the Talking Heads or the B-52’s) without touching another human being, or when Stairway to Heaven played, we’d hold onto our partner and awkwardly rock back and forth.
Nobody ever taught me how to actually dance with another person.
Whenever I’ve tried to swing around a dance floor with a partner, I’ve felt stiff and inept. I don’t follow well; giving up control of the direction of my movements - or of anything in my life! - feels unnatural, and only now as I’m entering the last year of my fifth decade am I starting to let go. There’s not all that much we can actually control, so we might as well enjoy the ride.
And enjoy it I did when I took a ballroom dancing lesson.
If not for this adventure quest, I would never in a million years have spent an evening as Arizima the Blue Dragon Sorcerer, fighting swarms of dog-sized rats and following distant violin music to Koaka the dryad, who holds the answers to the origins of the rat invasion.
People spend their time in such interesting and unusual ways.
With five adventures behind me, I’m now 1/12th of the way through my 60 adventures by my 60th birthday quest.
Having built a little wiggle room into the schedule, I decided to skip last week and focus on enjoying time with my family over the Thanksgiving holiday. But don’t worry, I’ll be back in a few days with a new adventure.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share some thoughts about this project. Here are five take-aways from my first five adventures - five reasons for you to consider starting one of your own.
Sometimes I forget I’m not 25 anymore. Needing to reach something behind a dresser, I hoisted myself up instead of getting a stool to step on. Ouch! My ribs didn’t like that, and a week later I still wince getting out of bed.
So I bagged a more physically demanding adventure and decided instead to take a ride in a helicopter, and even better, to take a flying lesson. How cool is that?
When people share an intense emotional experience they form a bond that transcends the usual markers of friendship.
Adopting a child is as intensely emotional as it gets. I consider the people who traveled halfway around the world with me, to meet their daughters when I met mine, like “family.” We don’t see each other often, and some of us have a difficult time understanding one another’s political views - but it doesn’t matter.
Getting together feels sweet, and we don’t do it enough.
So when one of the members of my extended adoption family looked at my Sixty to Sixty list and suggested a tour of the Connecticut Wine Trail, I was all in. Some other moms in our group joined us and off we went for a day of wine tasting, eating, enjoying beautiful scenery, and best of all, catching up, laughing, and commiserating with each other.
“Glassblowing” conjures images of a guy pulling a wad of molten glass out of the furnace on the end of a blowpipe, twirling it around, lifting the pipe to his lips and blowing it into an exquisite work of art.
That’s exactly what experienced artisans do, whether guy or gal - but not novices.
I mean, would you trust a newbie with a glob of glass heated to over 2,000 degrees?
When I bicycled long distances in my pre-kid days, I loved flying downhill after all the hard work of pedaling up. With cycling, you alternate between work and reward, work and reward.
Riding a Segway is all reward.
The older I get, the more I feel like Luke Skywalker in his X-Wing as he zooms into hyperspace. The world seems to be turning at warp speed: childhood ambles along, young adulthood moves into third gear, then middle age starts to zip by in a turbocharged frenzy.
So I’m trying to slow it down, especially when I’m with my kids.
Some parents rejoice when their children leave home - Yay! Freedom! - but not me. Maybe because I’m single, I feel the loss of my college kid’s presence pretty deeply, even as I’m thrilled with her independence and emerging adulthood. My high school daughter is hardly ever home, between school and dance, and I’m acutely aware that she’ll be leaving in less than three years. Tomorrow. A second. A nano-second …
All this to say that when she accompanied me on my first of sixty adventures, to Lost River Gorge in Woodstock, New Hampshire, spending time with her felt sweet.
