Quite often I get a strange kind of longing to be adventurous and it fills my dreams. I guess I should define what adventure means to me. It is definitely NOT riding a race horse or scuba diving or going bungee jumping! It is not even climbing a tree! Some say life is an adventure. Some say love is the greatest adventure. Some say death is an adventure too. Some say art is an adventure. Some have even said that marriage is an adventure! Well…!
For me, the adventure is in becoming someone that I can never become, in becoming someone that I never want to become… I wish I could explain it well. Now the best that I can do is to be adventurous in my thoughts, in my opinions, in my judgements… I wonder how it would be like to be adventurous with people, with situations, with choices, with decisions, and yes, with relationships. I love the way the word adventure sounds – it is so powerful, so daring and yet quite teasing. There is an ease with which the syllables slip from one to another – ad-ven-ture. Wikipedia defines adventure as “an activity that comprises risky, dangerous and uncertain experiences”. I hate the dangerous part of it and I romanticize the uncertain experiences that it offers. Wiki adds, “However, an adventurous activity can lead to gains in knowledge”. Not a bad deal!
I prefer to describe myself as a practical, level-headed and sensible human being. But, those who know me well – really well – also know that I would love to throw all cautions to the wind and plunge head down into a pool of uncertainty where neither pragmatism nor reason exists! But again, that same ‘those’ who know me well – really well – also know that I’d always linger on the edges of the cliff, never mustering up enough courage to actually make the plunge. May be, because deep down, I wonder if it the fall is really worth the jump!
I keep telling the significant ‘someone’ of my life that I want to own an elephant and tie it to my window! But I hate it when the ‘someone’ comes up with boring and totally colourless questions like how would you manage its food, the gargantuan expenses, and well, its shit! As a child, I used to get these dreams about the elephant that I owned, with which I lived at the sea shore in a tiny hut, and my elephant was tied to the window of the hut which had bamboo railings. I still have the vivid image of the sea, the hut and the elephant… the elephant which I may never own.
It is perhaps that fascination for adventure that has drawn me to books and movies where I can co-inhabit with men and women who don’t even belong to my world. They allow me to inhabit different worlds at the same time without ever giving up the world that I own… rather the world that owns me. Perhaps even this blog is a space where I negotiate with those worlds, where I try to strike a fair deal with my imaginary reels of adventure. It is indeed a moment of adventure even to acknowledge to myself that I dream about becoming that someone that I would never become, that someone that I never want to be.
Like Alice who has comfortably falls back to her world even after her trip to the wonderland, like Rip Van Winkle who wakes up again and finds himself in the same old world… I too would like to go for the free fall, only to bounce back and make sure that I still haven’t lost the ground beneath my feet.
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