A few days ago, I mentioned Irish writer James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in particular, some of its most famous lines, which read,

"He was alone.  He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.  He was alone and young and willful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight."

    Words to stir any adventurer or wanderer.  In them, Joyce captures the heart of his literary project, his fervent efforts to break loose from the strictures of his Roman Catholic upbringing, his dogged work to bring himself into a new definition of what it means to be human.  To let go, to let go of what had restrained him, to freely embrace the fullness of the unknown.

    Put another way, the heart of adventure.  How we adventure will vary widely but at its heart is the quest, indeed, the desire, to step into what we do not know.  Ironically, however, wherever we go, we will eventually find that the real adventure is to see, in all its frightening enormity, the known that grounds all unknowns.