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IN HIS MEMOIR, Education
of a Wandering Man, Louis L’Amour wrote, “As I
have said elsewhere, and more than once, I believe adventure
is nothing but a romantic word for trouble...What people speak
of as adventure is something nobody in his right mind would seek
out, and it becomes romantic only when one is safely at home.”
If adventure is only a romantic word for
trouble, then it follows that you can see trouble as an adventure.
In other words, trouble isn’t a reality; it’s a judgment.
And “adventure” would be an equally valid judgment.
I was once in an argument with my wife,
for example, that was getting too heated, so I took a break,
went down to the library to calm down, and thought about what
L’Amour said. And I asked myself, “How is this fight
like an adventure?”
“Well,” I replied to myself,
“I’m doing something I don’t do very often —
hanging out at the library. And doing something I don’t
normally do must be one of the prerequisites for an experience
I can call an adventure.”
Musing over this question, I thought, “The
fight itself is like a jungle. Can we find our way through it
to the River of Love? I think so. But we may get temporarily
lost in the tangled valley of Being Right. We may sink in the
quicksand of Hurt Feelings. We may miss the shortcut of Forgiveness
and have to take the long way around.
“There are predators to look out for:
We can get eaten alive by Dredging Up Past Injustices. The Unwillingness
to Exercise Self-Control is somewhat like a swarm of mosquitoes
that can inject us with malaria and make us sick for a long time,
slowing down our progress through the jungle.
“We must somehow get across the chasm
of our differences. One of us can cross it alone or we can meet
half way.”
And after thinking about it this way, I
went home and talked to Klassy with a different attitude. A better
attitude. Try it. When you run into trouble, ask yourself: “How
is this like an adventure?”
Ask yourself, “How is this like an adventure?” |
