Are you an Adventurer or are you a Seeker? Semantics and words can often lead us to a misunderstanding as our own understanding of the world and the way we describe it is often driven by our own history, with us only being able to explain how we experience the world based on the words and their definitions that we have learnt many, many years before, often in childhood.

Adventuring and Seeking are two worlds which have featured in my life ever since probably when I was in the Boy Scouts. I live my life with a curious and an inquisitive mind set and always have. I find real joy in exploration of all experiences looking for the learning in all moments of life, as words Adventuring and Seeking are words which could appear to be very similar for me in the way that I live my life. The similarities are powerful but so are the differences, from the outside looking in on an adventurer or a seeker it would probably be hard to differentiate between the two. They are both engaging in the world in a powerful and curious way. Challenging themselves to learning and experiencing the world in a fabulous multi-sensory way. Trusting themselves into every opportunity and even creating them where they can to make the most of every moment.

So what’s different? The history of how and when I learnt these words features heavily for me now. As a Boy Scout if you had a question about the world around you, you would go and look and to seek the answer to the question. So learning that the focus of the concept of seeking was to find an answer to a question but the answer is outside of ourselves. Adventures were those quests that you went on to explore an idea or to consolidate a feeling that you may have about yourself and how you may explore the world around you. The focus of adventuring for me is knowing that you have the answer and it is inside you, but you are yet to maybe articulate within your own thinking but to have faith in yourself to know it is there.

Faith is an interesting and at times a very provocative concept. For me it is a feeling, it provides a sense of inner warmth and confidence knowing that I have the answer to the question inside of me and that by engaging in the world and being part of everything around me, I will discover or learn to articulate the answer to the question and that answer is within me.

I will learn to articulate the answer in the way that I choose to experience and explore the world.

I type this as an adventurer whilst I may not know the answer to all the questions in my life, I have total faith that the answer to the question is, whatever the question is, is inside of me. I will find the answer to the question by the way in which I engage, explore and am enchanted with the world I experience. To engage in the world around me as a seeker it would seem that I would be seen to be doing very similar things to the adventurer, but the answer to the question would lie in a very, very different place. It would be outside of me.

Inside or outside may well be a semantic argument for some? But extending this further do you live your life at Cause or Effect? Do you make life happen for you or to you? Where is the focus of your emotion loci of control, is it internal? Do you have the ability to understand that whilst you may not choose that behaviour or the way another is reacting to you, that they are doing the best they can with what they have and that may be I don’t have to give this person emotional control of the rest of my day, week or life? Or are you able, whilst it is not always easy to strive to be at peace with yourself even if the world around you isn’t.

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

― Rudyard Kipling, If: A Father’s Advice to His Son
Read it in full here

I quest to be an adventuring adventurer every day and every moment of every day.

Are you an Adventurer or a Seeker?

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