A few years ago, when I created my profile for the Modern Elder Academy, they asked for a life slogan. As I am prone to ignoring GPS and turning left instead of right for the fun of it, I told my sons when they were little that “I’m not lost. I’m on an adventure.” Tada, my life slogan!
Yesterday I took my five-year-old grandson to the pumpkin patch. We bought our jack-o’-lantern-to-be, rode the tractor-pulled hayride TWICE, climbed to the top of four giant hay rolls where he clutched the pirate flag and I clutched his legs from the roll below (well, the tower was fifteen feet high! Maybe even a hundred feet tall!), scrambled through a tunnel, and replaced our faces in the pumpkin cut-outs while my husband took our pictures.
On the way home, instead of going straight, I turned left. It was a road I’d never been on before, but I caught sight of a woman putting the finishing touches on a coven of witches – there must have been twenty of them in her side yard. We stopped and oohed and aahed at the display. At our applause, the creator laughed and curtsied.
Now the adventure was afoot… we were on a quest to find more Halloween displays. At the next corner, I asked my grandson whether he wanted to go left, right, or straight. Our zigzag route took us through a new neighborhood where we discovered many more delights – some pretty, some SCARY, some silly. At each one, we stopped, rolled down the windows, and clapped wildly. We weren’t lost. We were on an adventure.