For good or ill, humans are explorers and changers of every environment they have come upon: physical and metaphysical.

We walk the earth and look across the universe, wondering what next.  Life is full of adventure and wonder for us.  As far as we know, there’s not another species quite like us.  We hardly know what to do with ourselves.

Life often doesn’t feel as wonderful and adventurous as this, though.

We have to do the food shopping, figure out how to pay unexpected bills, fight the tiredness that slumps us on the sofa at the end of the day, cope with the colds that makes us feel lousy.

Is the wonder and adventure a delusion?

“Only mediocrity its sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do.”*

To know if we’re delusional, we have to stop judging before we even try, even risk.

To know we are not being lazy – Daniel Kahneman warns how we are lazy thinkers, switching the question for an easy answer and not even noticing)** – we need to move out of our certainty into some uncertainty.  There are many things we can do to mix things up – today, and more tomorrow.  Here’s one:

‘Look at a map of your city or town.  Determine what areas you have not explored.  Make a list and tackle them one by one.’^

What are you seeing?  What are you feeling?  What is the idea from the future that emerges and how will you follow this?

I might be delusional, but then again, I may be doing some lazy thinking and an adventure lies just beyond the thought.

(*Yau the translator in Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.)
(**See Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
(^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)