My wife and I have sorta gotten hooked on reality TV shows – not Desperate Housewives, but…
So, it started with 100 Foot Wave, on HBO. We were totally stressed out over some now-tiny-but-in-the-moment-seemingly-huge crisis, and just wanted to watch the pretty pictures of the ocean.
If you haven’t seen that show, be prepared to be blown away. These tiny little humans throw themselves off the top of these 60-, 70-, eventually even 100-foot waves. Oh, they prepare, of course, and they work out, you know, and they’re all, like buff and stuff.
But, still 100 feet is way, like WAY up there!
The surfers all have sponsors, of course, and that’s who pays for the show. Garrett McNamara, kind of the focal point of the show, is never on camera unless he’s surfing, or he’s wearing his hat with the Mercedes Benz logo on it.
But he does it – he and a small team of die-hard big-wave tow-surfing fanatics go at the huuuuuuge waves at Nazare, Portugal, year after year. It’s pretty awesome to watch.
So, there’s another show on HBO called Edge of the Earth. There are only four episodes, and each features a different extreme sports fanatic doing something crazy, like skiing down a granite spire in Kazakhstan, or rafting the headwaters of a river in South America that’s never been rafted.
The last episode features these two guys who set off to surf their own 100-foot wave.
They drive their Land Rover up the west coast of South Africa and find themselves a beach with epic waves. And they set up camp, and they surf these waves.
Sounds like a snorefest, but the photography is heart-stoppingly beautiful.
And one of the guys casually says he didn’t know you could quit your career to do something like that. He always thought you need, like, permission or something.
For me, that was a huge revelation.
OMG, what have we missed because nobody told us it was okay to go do something? What adventurous roads did we not travel because we didn’t have permission?
Now that my hair is less brown (and his band renown) than it used to be, I find myself more addicted to security and financial safety, so my adventure roads tend to lead to places from which I can rapidly retreat.
But you? You’re younger, right?
If you want to quit the daily grind and go surf mondo huge waves, it’s totally and perfectly up to you!
It turns out NO ONE GIVES YOU PERMISSION to go on an adventure.
Because you don’t need it.
Ditching the 9-to-5 and throwing yourself off cliffs of water is not safe, of course, and your insurance agent might have a word or two about that. But, it it’s what you wanna do, splish-splash, amigo!
The revelation for me was that, although no one tells you can’t do these things, no one tells you that you can, either. Nobody says “yes, if you would like to do that, please go right ahead.”
For what it’s worth, here’s what I’m telling you: if you would like to do that, please go right ahead!
There, now you have permission to go be wild.
For my adventure, my wife and I visited the Santa Maria Museum of Flight. Yes, it’s off the beaten path, and we got caught in the rain and mud and dark.
But, hey, it was an adventure, and we didn’t have to ask anyone if we should do it.
Wow. Big adventure…
John D Reinhart 