🌱 Finding mini-adventures
For a change, I take out my earbuds before riding the empty bike paths at 9am. Somehow, the racing line feels a little faster as I hear the wind rush by. I feel brave (or maybe stupid?) enough to lean harder into the roundabouts.
Lately, I've been trying to have a little more fun. So, I aspire to regularly ask myself two questions:
- "What new or interesting thing can I do today?"
- "Will I regret it?"
The first forces me to find something that injects novelty into my routine. The second helps me overcome the activation energy necessary to do that thing.
These questions aren't meant for the travel-the-world, ride-a-rollercoaster kind of fun; they're about uncovering little adventures—like ditching the library for a secret spot in a new building, discovering a new coffee shop and ordering whatever the employees recommend, taking a detour to ride around the lagoon at midnight, or actually waking up to watch a sunrise by the ocean.
The more I grow, the more I notice the acceleration of time. First grade felt like it lasted forever—but seemingly, the years have grown shorter and shorter. Each moment becomes a smaller fraction of my already-lived life. And if we're to believe that novelty makes time pass by more slowly, that means we should seek out novelty—even in its tiniest forms.
Most of our days aren't going to be extraordinary. That's okay. But we can make the ordinary a little more fun by treating each day as a mini-adventure.