call to adventure

how spicy is it _really_?

About 36 hours into the covid experience, the symptoms just disappeared. These body aches were so intense; it felt like I had done some punishing weight lifting circuit, it felt like a pinched sciatic nerve, it felt like somebody was yanking on tendons that connect joints, and it moved from place to place like a summer thunderstorm. It’s weird—it makes me wonder if I imagined the whole thing. This is exactly how it was with the first two doses of the vaccine; it came on suddenly, messed me up for a little more than a day, and then utterly vanished. I guess it could have been something else—I did get a negative rapid test yesterday. But that isn’t unusual, apparently, for vaccinated people or people who have just developed symptoms. In fact, there’s very little that isn’t unusual: peeling fingertips, symptoms that disappear completely and reemerge 12 hours later, itchy neck, extreme farts, testing positive with no symptoms, testing negative with every classic symptom. Theories that omicron has quicker symptom onset, etc. etc. I know, you’re not supposed to take anecdotal evidence very quickly, but this massive field of symptoms and eventualities is so baffling that scientific process essentially demands a GLOMAR-esque “can neither confirm nor deny” response to every question you could ask. I’m definitely going to play it safe, consider myself very lucky, and take another test in a few days.

I wasn’t sick for long, but I did still experience that one hallmark of being unwell: Thinking, please, please, please, make me well, I’ll never take it for granted again. I will relish every walk to the drug store and every moment of sunshine, I will do everything I say I’m going to and don’t, I will eat so many vegetables, I will take my vitamins, I will pay attention, I will have adventures, I will feel the wind in my hair and go hiking in new places, I will be brave, I promise. Take me back! I will never take for granted the current of health in my body, I will stop tamping myself down with TV and solitaire, I will talk to strangers, I will leave myself just enough to meet unexpected lessons and come back home at the end of the day. I will do yoga! OK? Can I please come back now?

And now, like a dare, my body says: OK, kid. Let’s see it. Ha!

I’ve been listening a lot to the Make Art, Not Content podcast. It is brilliant—Father Bronques is the only person I’ve found who is talking about self-promotion, creative process, and how to actually engage with an audience in a way tailored to artists, and not self-help-y coaches. Not to shade self-help-y coaches (I guess? There’s some deserved slander in there), but most of the material I’ve consumed about how to have a business/be a business focuses on the angle of like, you’re saving the world with your “heart-centered solopreneur” business where you make canned Canva graphix to teach girlbosses how to … attachment theory … human design profile … oh my god can you tell what a shitty match I was for that whole paradigm?? It’s not their fault that I stayed too long at the party—it’s mine. But what can I say? I knew I needed to learn, and that’s where a lot of the heat was. Anyway.

In one of the episodes I was listening to lately—I think it was The Cure for Overthinking but I’m not totally sure—Bronques talks about the call to adventure. (I can’t remember which episode, but tbh you will have a great time listening to all of them, I promise.) In conventional hero’s journey plot structure, the call to adventure is the moment that the main character is invited to leave their present world of stasis and slow death to be challenged by an adventure. The adventure can be big or small. It can be scary. But it’s an opportunity to step off the path, and it’s necessary for narrative.

But in this episode, Bronques is talking about the call to adventure as something that happens in your actual life, every day. (Four times a day, in fact! Where does this number come from?? I have no idea, but I love it.) And, further, if you ignore the call to adventure too much, it will stop knocking on your door. If you want to live, if you want to play with life, you have to take it. At least some of the time.

The last time I took the call to adventure: I was talking with some friends after an AA meeting, and they said: We’re about to go on a drive-through tour, do you wanna come? Apparently one of them was losing their license briefly for DUI-related issues, so this drive-through tour was a way of celebrating the car and all its fantastic capacities, a fond farewell. Once their license was returned a little while later, there would be another drive-through tour in celebration. I thought it was a beautiful idea. And I said yes.

Just another portal. // Photo by Jonathan Petersson on Unsplash

I’m so glad I did. It’s silly, maybe you’d think you couldn’t have that much fun on a drive-through tour in the East End of Pittsburgh. But you’d be wrong. There was a whole plan: Go here first for a frosty, go there for this other thing, there for something else. We talked about our favorite fast food restaurants and why, we conjectured about why some people take like 10 minutes to make their order, we got into a long conversation with one of the cashiers about the spicy chicken (like, how spicy is it really?). We listened to Iggy Pop and T.Rex, and somehow, sitting in an idling car at twilight, it almost felt like we were on our way to an amphitheater concert. It was just beautiful, beautiful.

I have gotten into the habit of saying no. In like, 85 worlds out of 100, I probably would have said no to the drive-through tour. Under the guise of being a disciplined writer in deep focus, I’ve let my daily track become quite small. I can feel the best part of me crying out for yes and adventure, and I can feel the eating-from-a-bag-on-the-couch part of me being like Absolutely not, bitch.

And for me, that’s the lesson of being sick. It shows constant safety for what it is.

Of course, I’m about to drive to California with two cats, camping in a minivan, so it’s not like I’ve got zero adventure game. But lately, I have sinned the sin of safety. Big time. Plateaus are part of the process, and caterpillars have to be goo on their way to being butterflies. But goo time is over. I can feel it. Lol, yikes!

things I’m grateful for, 5/21/22:
figured out how to make coffee that doesn’t make me insane (maybe??)
kitten Hexie goes from being a couch terrorist to a cute lil paw licker in the space of 30 seconds
figured out how to rent my Cali roadtrip minivan (minivans are harder to find than you might think!!)
the absence of body aches (obviously)
that big tall summer green