Archive — Jamie Lyons
Don't be a fucking martyr. I'm telling you this as someone who spent too many years grinding himself into paste, chasing some idea of what I was supposed to be. Be lazy about it. Be inconsistent. Show up when you feel like it, bail when you don't. Save half your life, hell, save most of it, for the stuff that actually matters. The pointless, beautiful, stupid shit that won't look good on a resume. Fighting for something isn't enough if you don't stop to experience what you're fighting for. Get dirty. Get lost. Go somewhere with people who make you laugh until your ribs hurt. Walk into places you have absolutely no fucking business being. Wade into that river even though it's probably way too cold. Stand on top of something high and realize how small and ridiculous you are. Find a quiet spot and just... sit there. Let the silence remind you that most of what you worry about is bullshit. Keep moving. Keep your head screwed on straight, or at least screwed on somewhere. Stay curious. Stay hungry in the ways that matter. Do this, and I can promise you something: you'll outlast those poor bastards in their ergonomic chairs, the ones measuring their lives in quarterly reports and vacation days they're too afraid to take. The ones who forgot, or never knew, that being alive means more than just not being dead. You'll outlive them. And unlike them, you'll have actually lived. adventure (n.) c. 1200, auenture "that which happens by chance, fortune, luck," from Old French aventure (11c.) "chance, accident, occurrence, event, happening," from Latin adventura (res) "(a thing) about to happen," from adventurus, future participle of advenire "to come to, reach, arrive at," from ad- "to" + venire "to come". Meaning developed through "risk/danger" (a trial of one's chances), c. 1300, and "perilous undertaking" (late 14c.) and thence to "a novel or exciting incident" (1560s). Earlier it also meant "a wonder, a miracle; accounts of marvelous things" (13c.). The -d- was restored 15c.-16c. Venture is a 15c. variant. (v.) c. 1300, "to risk the loss of," from adventure (n.). Meaning "to take a chance" is early 14c. Related: Adventured; adventuring.
Adventure 2024
Charlie’s first time on a sailboat. Monterey Bay at sunset. Three years old and already braver than his old man. Here’s something to know when you take your kid out on the water for the first time: you’re terrified. Not of the ocean, I know the ocean, respect it, understand that it doesn’t give a […]
Read
Adventure 2022
Bolinas doesn’t want you to find it. The locals keep tearing down the highway signs, a middle finger to the hordes from San Francisco who’d otherwise choke this place with their Range Rovers and organic kombucha stands. It’s deliberate, this obscurity. And I respect the hell out of it. You wake up at five-thirty. It’s […]
ReadAdventure 2021
If you know, you know. If you don’t, no amount of explaining is going to make you understand what it means to stand there at dawn, wetsuit half-on, watching the sets roll in. This isn’t Malibu poseur bullshit. This isn’t trust fund kids playing at danger on longboards their daddies bought them. This is cold […]
Read
Adventure 2019
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose […]
Read
Adventure 2018
She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad – she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes – the toad became beautiful.C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces […]
Read
Adventure 2017
I think cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals. I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. Roland Barthes, The New Citroën, 1957 Rolling […]
Read
Adventure 2015
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. Jack Kerouac, On the Road The thing about Thanksgiving is that […]
ReadAdventure 2015
But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life Look at that […]
Read
Adventure 2014
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, For I would ride with you upon the wind, Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, And dance upon the mountains like a flame. W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire Listen, I get it. I fucking GET it. Here’s some romantic fool naming his […]
Read
Adventure 2014
My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word “progress.” At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood […]
Read
Adventure 2014
There is something about being small, genuinely, cosmically small, underneath that orange monument to human hubris, surfing Fort Point, while the Pacific tries its damnedest to kill me. The water’s so cold it feels personal, like it has a grudge. My body’s screaming at me that this is a terrible idea, and you know what? […]
Read
Adventure 2013
The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective. Henry David Thoreau Here’s the thing about getting on a boat with someone in the middle of San Francisco Bay: you find […]
ReadAdventure 2013
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea… Antoine de Saint Exupery There’s something almost obscene about seeing a boat out of water, like catching your grandmother naked or finding out […]
Read
Adventure 2012
It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing. Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time: A Novel You don’t understand Mavericks until you’ve stood on those cliffs with salt wind tearing at your face, watching thirty foot walls of Pacific rage explode against rock […]
Read
Adventure 2009
People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our […]
Read