The Importance of Adventure … why you should get yourself and your family outside.

Twelve goodIMG_1906 reasons to send your son, your daughter or yourself out to climb the mountains, paddle the rivers, sail the sea or crawl through the caves.

I was thinking about this post and knew I wanted to talk about the importance of adventure in our lives – especially that of young people. As I was pondering the words it occurred to me that many others have written about this so why recreate the wheel. So here are twelve of my favorite quotes that I have accumulated over the years that illustrate the importance of adventure in our lives.

Enjoy and feel free to share your own quotes too.

“Give children a chance to discover themselves.
See to it that children experience both success and defeat.
See to it that there are periods of silence.
Train the imagination, the ability to anticipate and plan.
Take sports and games seriously, but only as a part of the whole.
Free the children of rich and influential parents and from the paralyzing influence of wealth and privilege.”
— Kurt Hahn, 1930

“A child who is to be successful is not reared exclusively on a bed of down.”
— Akan Proverb

“Every game ever invented by mankind is a way of making things hard for the fun of it!” — John Ciard

“The sea, the granite quarries-nature herself-was seen not as something to be feared as the enemy but to be respected and even loved. You were taught to be in concert with nature. The sea, the rocks, the physical elements of nature were the training tools. You were not being trained to be an expert sailor or rock climber but rather how to use your knowledge and respect for them to make you a better person.” — Rev. Thomas B. Kennedy on his Outward Bound experience

“The trick is not to rid your stomach of butterflies, but to make them fly in formation.” — Unknown

“Mountain climbing is not the only way of dealing with an over organized, over protective society. But it is one good way.” — Woodrow Wilson Sayre

“One of the shocking realizations of adult life is that most of us are not fulfilling the most closely held dreams of our youth. Instead of pursuing dreams that were once integral parts of our personalities we end up in one way or another fulfilling someone else’s ideas about who and what we should be, usually at the expense of our creative urges. The universal yearning to be creative is eloquently expressed in these words by Antoine de Saint Exupery from Wind,Sand and Stars:  “Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were  shaped has dried and hardened and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.” — Galen Rowell

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”   — Oliver Wendell Holmes

“When our public educational system was implemented on a mass scale a century ago, they were serving a youth population that was “experience rich and information poor.” Today as a result of successive waves of social change from industrial, urban, and technological advances, education     serves a youth population which tends to be “information rich and experience poor.”  — J. Coleman, 1979

“Adventure is a commitment made by the entire being, and can search our depths to bring out the best, most human qualities which remain in us. When the pack of cards has not been rigged so we win every time, then the game is real, and we find surprise, imagination, enthusiasm to succeed and the possibility of failure. Adventure.”  — Walter Bonatti – Montagnes d’une vie Reflexions

“There can be no doubt that the young of today have to be protected against certain poisonous effects inherent in present day civilization. Five social diseases surround them, even in early childhood. There is the decline in fitness, due to the modern methods of locomotion; the decline in initiative, due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis; the decline in care and skill, due to the weakened tradition of quality; the decline in self— discipline, due to the ever— present availability of tranquilizers and the stimulants; the decline of compassion, which William Temple called “spiritual death”. — Kurt Hahn.

“The mountains can be reached in all seasons. They offer a fighting challenge to heart, soul and mind, both in summer and winter. If, throughout time, the youth of the nation accept the challenge the mountains offer, they will help keep alive in our people the spirit of adventure. That spirit is the measure of vitality of both nations and people. A people who climb the ridges and sleep under the stars in high mountain meadows, who enter the forests and scale peaks, who explore glaciers and walk ridges buried deep in snow — these people give their country some of the indomitable spirit of the mountains.” — William O. Douglas

Hope to see you, your family and friends out on the rocks.

Jon Tierney

About Jon Tierney

Internationally licensed IFMGA Mountain Guide, owner of Acadia Mountain Guides Climbing School and Alpenglow Adventure Sports Flight Paramedic, Lifeflight of Maine