Create a Summer Adventure List & Start the Summer Off Right

Memorial Day weekend arrives, marking the unofficial beginning of summer.  It’s time to bring out the grill, and also time to break out the markers and a piece of paper on which to compose your Summer Adventure List. 

A great tool for keeping all your summer ideas, plans and projects front and center, a Summer Adventure List is a great way to start the season off right.  It ensures that the summer doesn’t fly by without making time for those “This summer I want to . . .” activities that can fall by the wayside once the summer is off and running.  A Summer Adventure List also means that you'll have on-hand ideas for a summer full of activities that embody good creative thinking habits: adventure, exploration and play.   

My extremely organized friend, fellow paper lover and list-maker, Danielle, gave me the idea to create a summer list several years ago when I was lamenting that the summer goes by too fast.  She mentioned that she made a list of summer time activities that she wanted to get in by the end of the season and paper-clipped it to her kitchen calendar.  Since then, I have seen the idea appear in a few places, including this month’s Better Homes and Gardens magazine where they call it a “Sand Pail List” (a clever seasonal twist on the traditional Bucket List.)

My Summer Adventure List is not exclusive to only big-deal adventures.  Rather it contains a wealth of activities and projects that I want to approach with the mentality of an adventurer—from research on a writing project to visiting local historic sites.  Adventuring, as I have written about for the Summer Challenges, is a key ingredient to creative thinking, and as a frame of mind, it allows us to remain open and curious as we observe the journey.  It can make a boring task or obligation feel fresh and new, or it can take something that feels overwhelming and foreign and make it feel approachable.

My Summer Adventure List is sometimes a traditional list and sometimes it is a mind map.  I use a list format to capture an overview of the activities I want to do, go to, or need to plan for.  I use a mind map when I also want to include summer reading and creative projects.  I often create both, keeping the list on the refrigerator as an everyday reminder and my mind map in my sketchbook, where I can cross reference it as I work.

I encourage you to take an half hour this weekend, alone or with your family, to create a Summer Adventure list.  From taking an evening walk to get ice cream to planning a day trip, any adventure, big or small, that you want to do this summer should go on the list.  Have fun creating it and make sure to leave room on your list and schedule for additional ideas for adventures that will come to you over the next several weeks of warm weather.  

Do you have a tradition of keeping a Summer Adventure List?  If so, what are some of your favorite activities to list?  For those creating their Summer Adventure List, what are some of your activities listed that you are looking forward to?

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. – G. K. Chesterton       

                        

Summer Challenge Week Seven: Adventures

Challenge #7: Last week we explored how summer is often a time for journeys. This week we will take on the (often more accessible) Summer Adventure in all its interpretations. Key to this challenge is considering: What does adventuring mean to you? When was the last time you went on something that felt like an adventure? Adventures are a key ingredient to creative thinking. They should feel new, fresh, exciting, unknown, exploratory, and playful—which means that adventures can often be a frame of mind. With that as your touchpoint, think about all the new adventures you can have in a day—whether it means going to a new coffee shop or taking a different route to work, or planning a day trip to a different part of the state. This week, plan an adventure, big or small. Go adventuring and record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts and share here on The Paper Compass.

I am seated Indian style on the familiar floor of my local yoga studio, while a petite Korean woman works her way down the uneven row of people seated around me. I am watching her methodically remove a small patch of rubbing alcohol from the crown of the heads of the people before me, and then insert a long thin acupuncture needle with a quick tap, tap into the Sahasrara, also known as Heaven’s Gate, or, more simply, the Seventh Chakra.

It is Saturday afternoon and I have paid a small entrance fee for this special open-to-the-public workshop. While I had been initially curious by the posters at the yoga center, it was the open schedule of my afternoon that was the tipping point. I didn’t have a reason to not go, plus yoga events almost always make me feel joyous afterwards.

I reminded myself of this as the line of people sitting to my right, with what looked like small antennae sticking out of their heads, progressed closer to me. I tried to focus on my breathing, but I kept worrying if it was going to hurt, or if my over-active imagination, kept under extremely tight rein in my Clark Kent-like guise, was going to come bursting out of the top of my head, unleashed with the prick of the needle and fill the room with a dark, rotating cloud-like substance that would sweep out over the suburbs like a level 5 hurricane.

“Are you alright?” the Spiritual Acupuncturist casually, and not unkindly, asks me. She then distracts me by handing me the wrapper for the four inch needle that she then tap, taps into my head.

It barely even pinches.

And then there is a slow sensation of warmth trickling down from the top of my head, down my neck, and slowly making its way to the tips of my fingers. The sensation reminds me of a game my mom used to play with my brother, sister and I where she would break an imaginary egg on the crown of our heads, her hands spreading out from the top of our skulls, her fingers trailing slowly through our hair and down the sides of our faces like imaginary ribbons of egg whites, causing a sensation both hypnotic and full of creepy-crawlies. We would inevitably squirm away, only to come back and ask her to do it again.

This is the peculiar and wonderful moment where I realize that I am very glad that I came to the yoga seminar, as I am having an Official Adventure—even if it is in the unexpected form of sitting on the floor with a large needle sticking out of my head.

And this is the inspiration for the Seventh Summer Challenge: Adventures. Last week we explored how summer is often a time for journeys. This week we will take on the (sometimes more accessible) Summer Adventure in all its interpretations. Key to this challenge is considering: What does adventuring mean to you? When was the last time you went on something that felt like an adventure?

Adventures are a key ingredient to creative thinking. They should feel new, fresh, exciting, unknown, exploratory, and playful, which means that adventures can often be a frame of mind. With that as your touchpoint, think about all the new adventures you can have in a day—whether it means going to a new coffee shop or taking a different route to work, or planning a day trip to a different part of the state. This week, plan an adventure (big or small). Go adventuring and record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts and share here on The Paper Compass.