I want to tell you about some of my recent adventures, but first:
In early 2010, I moved to Salt Lake City, driven by the desperate need to escape. Utah Valley, where I’d lived for much of my life, was boring. Salt Lake was where everything happened. It had beautiful architecture and an artistic community and concerts and random free events. Utah Valley had nothing.
Then something happened to me in Salt Lake City: I got bored. It didn’t actually matter that there were, objectively, more events, opportunities, and potential connections than there are in Utah Valley. It didn’t matter that I had reliable transportation and enough money to easily get to those events. None of that mattered, because I just sat at home feeling bored and feeling bad about no longer having anything but myself to blame for my boredom.
Now, I live in Utah Valley. I have no car, making my way by foot or bus instead. I recently gave up my cell phone. I’m living on student loans. And it’s true I’ve spent a lot of time traveling over the last year, but many of my best adventures happen within walking distance of home. Which brings us to that picture I showed you.
It’s nothing fancy. Just some housing architecture that I think is pretty cool. In Utah Valley, that’s something of a rarity; we may not have (d)evolved to identical rows of manufactured homes, but it’s still refreshing when I find a house with a sense of history and personality.
The thing is, I’ve walked down 1st North hundreds of times. In the last month alone I must have walked that street at least a dozen times. But I didn’t see those houses there, and why? It’s not like new they’re new. It’s just that I was looking to the right. There’s a big housing complex on the right-hand side with a big sign outside indicating that this particular eye-sore was brought to you by the Provo Housing Commission. Each time I walked down that street I looked at the complex, and sometimes I wondered who lived there and sometimes I thought of the complex politics of welfare and mostly I just tried not to pay too much attention.
What I didn’t do was look left.
It’s so easy to just keep walking, to look at the obnoxiously loud eye-sores of our landscape or to pile up all the reasons why our lives/regions/opportunities are limited/sad/boring. What becomes apparent as you drop that assumption is that your world is not comprised of various known objects arranged in a predictable line. Your world is a series of verbs, interconnected and colorful, always moving, and filled to brimming with possibility. We can paint the picture of adventures “out there,” somewhere in the far away, but every far away is somebody’s home. Somewhere out there, people are feeling bored and trapped and wishing they could be standing right where you are right now.
There are all sorts of adventures to be had in your own area. In a bit here, I’m going to share some of my stories and advice on what I’ll call “Nearventuring”: Finding all those stories worth telling that are hidden in the places you thought you knew.
The post Nearventuring: On the Importance of Looking Left appeared first on Robbie Blair Writes.