“If we got to choose our adventures, they wouldn’t be very adventurous would they?”

“If we got to choose our adventures, they wouldn’t be very adventurous would they?”

The musician Ólafur Arnalds wrote this on Instagram this week, accompanying a post about his car breaking down in the mountains and being rescued by a stranger.

I’ve been thinking a lot about adventures lately.

This is me on a school trip to Israel when I was thirteen. That morning we’d taken the cable car up to the rock plateau of Masada and I’d walked smack into the side of a rocky outcrop. I was given emergency stitches by a doctor at a Dead Sea resort. Here I am with our tour guide afterwards, blood down my t-shirt.

Cars breaking down. Mishaps and missteps. These events pepper our lives.

And in those moments is where the stories lie. When things go smoothly and there’s no grit, there’s no story. Would my teenage Interrail trip around Europe be as memorable if I hadn’t visited a convent in Munich to have a massive blister dealt with (yes, by a nun)? Would our honeymoon in Cuba have been so memorable if we hadn’t had our watches set to the wrong time? And my school trip to Israel - I wouldn’t still be talking about it unless I’d walked into a mountain (it turned out I needed glasses).

Adventures are those times when something happens: when there’s a story to be told.

And for most of us, our working lives and careers are also adventures. A job suddenly ends. A health crisis throws a curve-ball. There’s a once-in-a-generation pandemic. We’ll walk into that metaphorical mountain side. There will always be parts of our life where things don’t go to plan. And I think it’s in those experiences - the curve balls and the crises - that we really get to learn what we’re all about and what makes us tick.

Watch out for that overhanging rock ;)