The importance of fun and adventure

At the Handel Group, we believe that a full human life is comprised of 18 areas. The areas of life that clients typically want to work on are relationship, body, career, money, time, character traits. In the shadow of the “big 6,” the other 12 often get overlooked, and yet are just as important in contributing to our overall happiness in life. I decided to test this out by taking on the area of fun and adventure in August.

As many of you know, I spent 2.5 weeks working from Switzerland in August. In the mornings, while my US clients were still slumbering, I would walk around town, go to museums, take tours, sample cheese and chocolate, and visit churches. I would coach for the better part of the afternoon and early evening, and then hit the town with my friends Elke or Helene in the evening to see concerts, performances, or swim in salt springs. On the weekends, I went for bike rides, visited festivals, hiked in the Alps, went to the circus (twice), met interesting people, swam, and went to barbeques. In other words, I spent 2.5 weeks focusing on fun and adventure.

Fun and adventure, I found, is like a drop of yellow die dipped into the flowing river of your life: it makes everything else seem a bit brighter. For example, I faced my fair share of “stressful” incidents while in Switzerland. My health insurance fell through, and so I had to scramble to find a new provider in 12 days (and in Rhode Island to boot, which ain’t no Massachusetts). I accidentally ended up in Germany when I thought I was still in Switzerland, and had to figure out how to scrounge up Euros. An old sports injury, which had debilitated me for 8 months in 2004, flared up again.  But none of those things phased me nearly as much as they would have had I been back in Providence. I was simply having too much fun to be weighed down. Fun is the jolt of happiness that puts all of those worries in perspective.

Adventure helps you become more aware of the present moment. Those 2.5 Swiss weeks seemed to last for several Providence months, not because Swiss clocks are funky, but because each moment had something new and exciting to observe in it. A gorgeous Alpine vista. A new type of cheese I had never tasted. A Swiss person with a funky outfit. Because I was keenly aware of more moments in my days, my days felt fuller, longer, and more satisfying. Like I was sucking the juice out of every last bit of them. Now that I am back in Providence, I remember to take a minute or two to simply stop and savor.

Finally, adventure connects you intimately with the web of humanity that is all around us. Adventure plucked me out of my known world in urban Providence, and placed me down in a land where I didn’t know the language, customs, or infrastructure. Even how to buy vegetables in the local grocery store was non-obvious. In the midst of so much uncertainty, I needed to rely more than ever on the kindness of strangers. And as in every other travel experience I have encountered, humanity stepped up to the challenge, and then some. We really do live but for the grace of others, and stepping out into the adventurous unknown provides a keen reminder of that.

Mission accomplished, fun and adventure IS a very important area of life to attend to. The good news is that you don’t need to travel to Switzerland to have fun and adventure. I’m finding that Providence has plenty to offer, too .

What adventure are you taking on this month?

A blog by Dr. Samantha Sutton, senior life coach at the Handel Group

On catching trout

Back in my graduate school days, I had a young, ambitious advisor. He was a good advisor–he cared about my growth as a person, listened deeply to what I said, and taught me a variety of lessons about how to do science.

But one thing that drove me batty was how he would sometimes blow off commitments he had made to the people in his lab. If he told us he would read a draft of our paper by next week, we would be lucky if he had read it by next month, and that was WITH persistent pestering. One of my fellow graduate students, Duane, even posted a sign that said something to the effect of “Go away: I’m reading papers!” on his door in the hopes of scaring would-be distractions away.

I asked my advisor how he organized his time, and his response was that “a consequence of success” is that you have way more balls than you can possibly juggle, and so you need to let some hit the ground. I left that conversation feeling resentful that I was a dropped ball in his world.

Fast-forward a year. I am in a career that I am crazy passionate about, and with that excitement has come a bevy of ideas, opportunities, and fun project ideas. I want to do it all, but would need several lifetimes to do so.

I used to make decisions about what to do and not do by asking myself what was fun and what wasn’t… but that system breaks down when most things are fun and exciting. Instead, I now make decisions based on what is most important to me, knowing that, after reeling in some beautiful fish on my fishing rod, I have to release some back into the lake. It’s a lot harder to release a fish when it is a beautiful, fat, shimmering trout than when it is an anemic little minnow. But that’s what happens when you live on a lake of abundance. Would you have it any other way? The skill to learn, then, is how to be razor-sharp about your priorities and goals, and have the discipline to catch and release.

The other day, I was talking with a fellow ex-labmate, who echoed these same observations about life post-lab. And we both realized that we now understood the world my advisor lived in. He wasn’t slacking off, or thinking our papers and projects were inconsequential. His world was one of abundance, and we were two of in sea of shimmering trouts. Given that we were often thrown back into the lake, he must have been reeling in some amazing catches .

Now, my advisor should have been honest with us about what was really going on: that he wasn’t going to read our papers for another few months, for example. And, you could argue, graduate student trouts should be automatically kept, and never thrown back. But at the same time, I feel like I now better understand the world that my advisor lived in, and can appreciate the abundance he must have been experiencing.

Image courtesy of http://naturalpatriot.org/