\əd-ˈven-chər\

adventure: an exciting or dangerous experience.

I have a love-hate relationship with the word adventure.
love: It embodies everything I like about life and trespassing.
hate: It is heinously overused and completely bastardized by photos of hipsters looking at waterfalls. (Thanks, friends.)

As a kid, an adventure was following the dogs into the woods and trying to shoot trees with my bow and arrow. (I really needed glasses.)
As a teen, an adventure was walking through the mall after smoking a teensy bit of weed.
As a college student, it was getting drunk and going for a swim in the 2-foot deep reflection pool.
Now, it's a personal quest to avoid a desk job.

I want to reclaim "adventure" somehow. Maybe we just need a new word that means the same thing. I wish this were like German and we could just mash a bunch of other words together to make a new one—so the new "adventure" could be like "superhappyjourneysfuntimewaterfallsyeah." I think I may have just insulted two different cultures right there. Strike that one.

My point is that adventure needs to get back to its roots, past all of the instagram photos and Cheryl Strayed wannabes. 

Adventure is gritty: it's scraped knees and no iPhone, wiping your bum with a leaf and washing the dishes with a pinecone, jumping in with no clothes on and eating a bit of dirt just to see what it tastes like. It's seeing something wild, and not taking a photo of it (think Secret Life of Walter Mitty). It is deeply primal and uniquely human.

Adventure is a mindset, and I think we all need a little bit more of whatever we want to call that.