And so it begins...

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”  -Eleanor Roosevelt

“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.” -George Eliot

“I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve.”
-Edmund Hillary


It would seem logical to start a blog about daily adventures with the tale of an adventure. I considered waiting until I had one to report on, but that opened me up to the unconquerable well of potential procrastination. If I waited until I had an adventure worth writing about, I might never write anything.

Further, the point of this blog will be to find the adventure in the every day. Some days I'll have real adventures to recount. Living in the (unimaginably gorgeous) foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, I find myself with countless opportunities to hike, camp, kayak, swim and otherwise explore nature in a way not possible in my flat homeland of Northwest Indiana. Even my daily (I wish - more like occasional) runs are filled with continual visual assaults by overwhelming beauty that makes it very hard to contemplate ever leaving "God's country," as my father once described my adopted environment.

But those are not the only adventures I'll have to tell you about. I finally motivated myself to get going on writing by googling "quotes about adventure," the highlights of which are posted above. I chose the first one for its speaker; although I'm not actually named after Eleanor Roosevelt (my staunch Republican parents would rather die, I'm sure) there's something to be said for having a namesake who's one of the most respected women of the twentieth century.

The third, from Edmund Hilary, seemed applicable to my life, and really to anyone - you don't know you'll be a famous adventurer until you give it a try, right? One of the (unspoken) goals of this blog is to harbor fame and fortune for myself. (I suppose it's no longer unspoken. Drat.) Plenty of people have been plucked from obscurity and turned into authors or producers thanks to sharing their stories or pithy observations with the "blogosphere," as it were - surely plenty of them were just as mediocre and fearful as I am.

But the middle quote, from the author of one of my favorite books, truly gets to the heart of the point of this blog. I could spend quite a while analyzing how it reflects Eliot's overall perception of drama, conflict, growth, etc. and the ability of the particular to represent the universal, as seen in the mammoth, impressive, carefully woven novel Middlemarch.

To spare my few readers, though, I'll avoid extensive literary analysis and nerdiness for now. (Be warned, I'm certain that will be an adventure I'll go on at some point.) What I want to takeway from Eliot's quote today is what I hope to accomplish in my blogging efforts. True adventure is not what we do, where we go or who we meet - it's how we change, what our experiences do to transform us, what we internalize about the external.

And, of course, it's our willingness to take those adventures, to consider those changes, to challenge ourselves. Therefore, for the first of what will hopefully be countless daily adventures from Ellie, I am starting a blog.

I've likely gone on to long already and turned away anyone who might be interested in hearing my thoughts. I worry I'm trying t0o hard for my prose to be impressive, crafting each sentence too carefully and sounding a bit too pretentious. (I promise I really do love Middlemarch, I'm not just trying to sound smart by citing one of the longest books ever.) But I want to try my hand at this, to start writing, reflecting and transforming in front of an audience, present to hold me accountable.

Thanks for coming along on my adventure.

p.s. The format will get more exciting, I promise. Maybe that will be my next daily adventure: making my blog physically attractive.