An adventure takes us out of ourselves.  It removes us from who we thought we were, and places us in situations we didn’t expect to face; demands from us a strength we didn’t think we possessed; gives us wounds we didn’t expect to receive, or thought we could recover from.

An adventure changes us.

How does a person with a day to day job have an adventure?  We think of Jason and the Argonauts, or the Odyssey, not Bill at his 9 to 5 desk job.

To some extent, Harry Potter and his buds are in a situation like this.  They go to school every day.  They have homework.  They play sports.  Sure, they’re magical, but even the magic is routine in the sense that they have to learn and practice to be able to use it.

Harry had Voldemort and the Death Eaters to contend with.  But our lives aren’t without fears or monsters, or even forces seemingly out to destroy the world.  Our life is an adventure too, if we can only see it that way.

Our practice is preparation, an initiation to our own adventure.  To some extent our adventure chooses us, but we also choose it.  Each of us has that dragon in our minds that we need to face and subdue in order to move forward, to get past that gatekeeper and move on to the next level.

We each of us know what that obstacle is that is holding us back, that makes us afraid, or that keeps us from doing our work.  The adventure begins when we start to practice, when we learn discipline, and endure the pain of facing our fears.