The Art of the Small Adventure

COVID has taught me the art of the small adventure.

Each week, a mystery text arrives, containing the name and address of a coffee shop.  Usually, it’s far away.    

COVID has taught me the art of the small adventure.  With gratitude for being healthy and still employed, this time has been filled with deliberately chosen small adventures.  The big adventures – travel, new restaurants, live theater – are off the table for all of us, and so the small ones become extra delightful. 

Gretchen Rubin has famously suggested adding the word "meditation" to any boring activity, to allow it to become a contemplative practice.  “Bus stop meditation” is so much more enlightening than waiting impatiently for the bus, tapping your foot and checking your phone.  In the same way, any small activity can become a small adventure.  The New York Times recently shared the story of a group of friends who broke up the winter monotony for each other, with a month’s worth of small changes called “The Daily Dose.” 

Each Daily Dose was small enough to accomplish in a day: brush your teeth with the opposite hand, or wear two different colored socks.  “We’d each open one first thing every morning, like taking a vitamin,” she says.  “Count how many glasses of water you drink today,” read my first dose. Easy enough. “Do a household task you’ve been putting off,” read the next. I replaced the broken hinge on a kitchen cabinet. Checking things off the to-do list felt good.” 

The small adventures break up the COVID weeks.  While we are still new-ish to the Washington, DC area, my husband and I are going to every Metro stop to see where it is, and to walk around the neighborhood.  Our favorite so far is one I’d never heard of: Morgan Boulevard.  We have found beautiful neighborhoods, gritty neighborhoods and places changing so fast that we wonder about the people left behind when all the Soul Cycle and waxing shops appear. 

The coffee shop texts come from my daughter, and we get to talk as we visit the far-flung shops.  Along with the coffee, I get a bigger does of her life, as we walk in the area, lifting our masks to sip the coffee and stopping to marvel at a new-to-us neighborhood.

When COVID ends, and the big adventures come back, I hope the small ones stay, too. 

-- Mary Austin

This cup is from The Wydown, one of my favorites. https://thewydown.com/