In my early years friends warned that I would get killed by bicycling, mountain climbing and scuba diving for a year in South America.
They feared I might die by traveling across the Outback of Australia. It confounded them that I wanted to backpack into the Himalayas. For certain, a shark would eat me somewhere in the Indian Ocean. There’s no question, I could be killed at any moment during my bicycle travels around the world with just one driver who might roll over me with his or her 4,000-pound vehicle.
No question! It happens. Yes, I could have been killed many times. I still feel fortunate not to have been eaten by a grizzly bear that stared at me, not four feet away, while I awoke in my tent by the Russian River in Alaska in 1977. He could have used my brother Rex and me for dessert after gorging on salmon– but he didn’t.
For the record, I continued my continent-jumping adventures anyway. I didn’t buy into fear. I didn’t compare. I didn’t think about dying. I pursued living.
I maintained my most powerful passport to an adventuresome life: self-confidence.
Please realize this reality: you can play it safe your whole life in order to avoid the travails and dangers of living. If the Nature Channel takes you to as close to adventure as you wish, by all means, click the remote. Me? I’d rather smell an elephant in India, catch a salmon out of the Russian River in Alaska and backpack the Inca Trail in Peru.
Yes, it’s true, my brothers and I enjoyed a mom and dad who instilled in us a sense of self-confidence. Once you possess it, you carry it for life.
If possible, imagine that regular people are like you. They’re just like you, no more and no less. They’ve got their own fears, too. That includes me! You must develop your own self-confidence.
You decide to pursue your dreams. Once you make your little dreams come true, the bigger ones become easier. In time, they become normal.
The Power of Adventure.
When coyotes howl outside your tent, that may be adventure. While you’re sweating like a horse in a climb over a 12,000 foot pass, that’s adventure. When howling headwinds press your lips against your teeth, you face a mighty adventure. While pushing through a raging rainstorm, adventure drenches you. But that’s not what makes an adventure. It is your willingness to struggle through it, to present yourself at the doorstep of nature. Can any greater joy come from life than living inside the moment of an adventure? It may be a fleeting ‘high’, a stranger that changes your life, an animal that delights you or frightens you, a struggle where you triumphed, or even failed, yet you braved the challenge. Those moments present you uncommon experiences that give your life eternal expectation. That’s adventure! Frosty Wooldridge.
It’s all there for you, too, no matter what your age. Frosty Wooldridge, on tour, the world is my playground, 6 continents of bicycle travel.
Read more posts by Frosty Wooldridge here. Frosty is a blogger for JenningsWire Online Magazine.
The online feature magazine, JenningsWire.com, is created by National PR Firm, Annie Jennings PR that specializes in providing book promotion services to self-published and traditionally published authors. Annie Jennings PR books authors, speakers and experts on major high impact radio talk interview shows, on local, regionally syndicated and national TV shows and on influential online media outlets and in prestigious print magazines and newspapers across the country.
