The Adventure

You are an adventurer.

Every time you crack open the yellowing or perhaps glossy pages and smell that familiar fragrance, it begins yet again. Your adventure renews itself, perhaps shifted infinitismally in mood, setting, or purpose, but in essence it is the same adventure that you have experienced again and again.

But are you a real adventurer? Is a real adventurer not supposed to be truly unbounded in terms of imagination, completely sold out to the idea of his or her own free will?

You are an adventurer.

As soon as the adventure begins, you can feel it. There is a force that guides you through the series of events, telling you what to do, telling you what to see, telling you what to feel, telling you that the path of action you have taken is the correct way and never allowing you to feel for a moment that you will always recall that moment in which the choice was presented to you, never allowing you to ponder what exactly would have happened had you taken the other door, never giving you the option of wondering whether it may have turned out better for you.

Maybe, you then think, I am not a real adventurer.

You are an adventurer.

What, then, is an adventurer? Is is someone who abandons their life in pursuit of their dreams? Or does it even have to go that deep? Can it simply be anyone who suddenly takes up a new identity, casting aside their old self to become someone completely different?

When the pages have run their course, do you ever find yourself in shock at your surroundings? Does the question of who you are and where you are ever enter your mind?

You are an adventurer.

As an adventurer, you must be unburdened by your own thoughts and opinions. You must feel what that guiding force tells you to feel. If you linger too long within yourself, the adventure breaks and you must start it anew. You must learn to be whoever you are told to be.

Now that ruins the whole point of being an adventurer, doesn't it?

You are an adventurer.

Is it not unhealthy to switch between so many personalities, so many cultures, so many life stories? Do you ever wonder whether one of the identities is the real you, and maybe you are the puppet? Maybe they're making their escape by pretending to be you?

To be an adventurer, you must be insane. You must be unstable, you must be reckless, and you must be unwelcome in your own society.

You are an adventurer.

But how, you insist, can so many different people all see the same words, and all become the same adventurer?

That is why you are an adventurer. No two people think in exactly the same way, no two people come out of the same conversation feeling exactly the same. Where the adventure might darken your day, it might bring a ray of sunshine to the gloomy life of someone else. When the adventure begins, you don't know what to expect. You may know how it ends, but it is impossible to foresee what change might take place within your own consciousness throughout the journey. That is the excitement of the adventure. That is why you return for more adventures, even while knowing that you have seen it all before.

You are an adventurer.