Microadventure 1: failure

This post is part of the 30 Micro-adventures in 30 days of lockdown series.

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So here we are 2 days into our microadventure challenge in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Why haven’t I posted about a challenge yet? Well I’d love to say it was because I didn’t want to post things on April the first, lest you think it was an ‘April Fool’. But in all honesty, it was more because I had a “fail” of a day 1.

“You failed on day 1?! What type of adventurer are you?!” might be what you’re saying (or at least thinking) right now. “We tuned in to get inspiration, not you failing at step one of a MICRO-adventure.”

And that was certainly what I beat myself up for a while thinking. I’ve solo-travelled many countries, been held at gun-point, run ultra-marathons, slept in incredible places, took on all sorts of challenges. So why had I just failed at this silly thing?

See our tent? In the land of the Midnight Sun (Summer Island, Norway)

But that’s where I want us stop for a second (and having not even started, I’m guessing stopping won’t be too difficult!). Failure is something we must get used to as adventurers (and humans!), and not feel guilty about (in this case of adventuring – perhaps different in the case of moral failure). You don’t end up on world adventures, doing heroic things, if you can’t embrace failure. That could be failure doing incredible feats, but more likely it’ll be failure in basic things like I’ve just done: Not getting enough work done that day; filling my evening with other priorities like church prayer meeting, phoning a friend; and looking up at dark skies thinking “this isn’t the night to start”.

Now there are good things in there, and ways around all of the other things, so that I could still have gone ahead. But for whatever reason, my heart wasn’t in it, and with only myself to motivate me while I’m in isolation, I failed. Let’s call it what it is, embrace it and figure out how to move on.

Al Humphreys reminds us that for every person we look on and think “wow, they’re an incredible world adventurer – I wish I could do those things!”, there are ways of starting with baby steps to head in that direction. Micro-adventures can be those baby steps – gradually easing us out of our comfort zones, and over time, expanding the list of experiences we are very happy doing, allowing us to leap forwards with what we attempt.

In the meantime, I’ll catch up soon with the 30 microadventures, and before we do, let’s just take this as a great starting place: failure will always happen if we attempt things in life, so let’s learn to process it well and move on.

Let’s hope day 2 is a bit better….let me know how you’re getting on!

Embracing temporary failure, as I led the lads 1 hour out of our way, on our (successful) attempt (just about!) to do the 4 peak challenge in Ireland last year. To make up for it, we had to walk vertically up a steep section of Mweelrea – but we had no other choice – with some failure there is no point stopping to dwell on it!