Once upon a time, I lived and worked in Sun Valley, Idaho, taking a semester off from college.  I lived in a dorm that had a fire pole from the second floor with a bunch of other ski bums.  Sometime near the end of my tenure there, three young women appeared to live in the dorms.  In retrospect, I realize they weren't like the rest of us–college students working playing for a semester.  They had moved from a nearby town for the work.  (Most of us were on the housekeeping staff.  Fun job, said nobody ever.)

I don't remember their names or even their faces.  I'm embarrassed to admit that in my memory they all sort of look alike.  But what I do remember is the motto of one of them, repeated over and over:

Life's an adventure!

This admonition has rung in my head ever since.  I've had times when I believe it, and times when I don't.  When I believe it, good things happen:

–My writing flows.  And in my world, when the writing flows, all else follows.

–Fun abounds.  

–Nothing fazes me.  (Case in point: I once missed a connection in Denver.  Instead of fussing and fighting, I said to myself, life's an adventure, and trundled down the concourse to my favorite restaurant there to run into a fellow passenger and have a delightful time drinking wine together.)

–Mysterious, synchronistic things occur.

–Life really feels like an adventure.

And in the times when I don't believe it, everything is vaguely fuzzy and dull, like things aren't quite in focus.  It is very, very easy to forget that life's an adventure.  So how to stay focused in this mindset?  Sometimes, its enough to repeat the mantra.  Uh-huh. Right.  The problem with that is remembering the damn mantra in the first place.

Funnily enough, one way to live life as a grand adventure is to stay rooted in routine.  Take writing, for example (as you knew I would).  When you are writing routinely every day, you fall in love with the world.  Or at least I do.  But I suspect you do, too.  Maybe you don't describe it in quite the same words, but I'm sure we share the same feeling of things just being right.

And when things are just right, they fall into place as they should.

And when things fall into place as they should it feels as if there's a benevolent king arranging things just for our benefit.

And then life truly does feel like an adventure.

All because you committed to a routine of writing daily.

At the workshop I taught in Nashville a couple weeks ago, THE MOST POPULAR THING WE TALKED ABOUT was the idea of writing 15 minutes a day.  (#15minsday on Facebook and Twitter.) Because when people realized they could create a satisfying writing practice in 15 minutes a day, it gave them hope.

So commit to your writing habit–and watch the life of adventure blossom around you.

How do you cultivate a life of adventure? Please discuss.