works of wanderlust

A month or so before I left my big government job in 2023 I made a list. 

It was that typical sort of list for someone going through a life transition and it contained one hundred and change ideas of how to spend the next year or so, keeping busy and not losing my mind.

I didn’t track any of it.

I mean, some of it was in my head, locked in a kind of mental checklist of things I wanted to do, but life did what life always tends to do: stuff happened, the list mostly got derailed, and two and half years later I rediscovered this ambitious missive from my past self who didn’t yet know that life would have a bunch of flipping and flopping events both small and global that would get in the way of my optimistic plans.

I found that list one morning, the day I am writing these words in fact, and I went through with my virtual highlighter and checked off the twenty or so things I actually managed to accomplish. Some of them were pretty cool. I did some traveling and made some streaks and wrote a book and did some professional stuff that even I figured was a long shot back in 2023.

But there were a lot of things on that list that I haven’t yet done. 

And one in particular caught my eye. 

I had made a note that I should “log 500km in adventure walking” and yeah, sure, I’ve done a lot of walking this past two and a half years, spent a lot of time on my feet, run and wandered and strolled to the coffee shop with my keyboard to write, too. None of it, I feel, was really exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that item on the list.

What is an adventure walk anyways?

Well. That’s not so tricky to nail down as it might seem.

In the simplest evaluation, an adventure walk is only this: a walk leading to some kind of adventure, an exploration of somewhere moderately unknown, and mostly just putting footprints in a place that is more interesting than the bicycle path around the neighbourhood park. A walk to the store can turn into an adventure, but rarely would one set out for the store claiming it was legitimately an adventure-seeking activity.

This got me to thinking (as you may have realized by the fact that such thinking got me to writing) and as the city around me starts to thaw again for the spring, now might be just the time to think about what a summer of adventure walks might look like. Yeah, five hundred klicks might sound like a lot, but broken out into a a spring an summer, say two walks per week at ten klicks per walk that is suddenly a very achievable sort of plan.

In fact it is early March as I write this and I can easily see myself planning pleasant walks around the city and beyond well into November. Inclusive, that gives me a solid nine-ish months to plan and log, say, fifty walks each about ten kilometres long and each fitting a number of basic criteria.

Criteria One: It has to fit the definition of an adventure, in that it needs to be a walk to or through a place where I have never walked before, or at least somewhere I don’t go regularly. I can retread ground to get there, but the destination or the route needs to be novel and reasonably interesting.  Cutting across that familiar field at a different angle, or walking through a back alley instead of the main street in my neighbourhood would not count—but turning up that path through the woods to check out the view of the river valley from the other side of the hill would. What counts as adventure? I think it’s as that old saying goes: I’ll know it when I see it.

Criteria Two: It needs to be logged. I have a GPS watch so in the strictest sense of turning on the tracking for my adventure walk and uploading a GPX file to a website later is pretty much automated and mundane at this point. But I also don’t think that will cut it. I think I need to both (a) write something about the adventure after it is over, and (b) have taken some kind of photo, made some kind of sketch, or otherwise captured some element of the space in an audio-visual medium to share that will make it properly “logged” for it to count.

Criteria Three: It needs to be a purposeful walk, by which I mean that accidentally logging an adventure walk, or incidentally recording some stroll I took out of convenience is not going to cut it either. I think it needs to be planned. It needs to be something where I say, look, I’m going to this place to do a walk from A to B and maybe even back again and that was the intention of the effort. There needs to be a sense of intentionality and a notion of forethought behind the adventure. I’m not locking myself into setting a departure date and time or plotting a route in advance or creating a checklist of my itinerary along the way, but I do think it needs to be more an a whim of the moment.

And that’s it. Can I log fifty walks in one year? Can I find fifty walks worth of adventure in and around my city? What will it look like if I do? What will it accomplish, if anything at all? I don’t know that answer to any of that as I write this, but I do know that my 2023 self would be happy knowing that I’m still trying to find purpose in this life of transition and change.