Continued thoughts on aspects of adventure - those beginning footsteps

"In that moment out of the current, as though a dolphin finding itself in midair above the waves, feeling the coolness of the air before it returns to the depths, so is this an opportunity for the awareness of a transforming sensation that makes me "new" before I too must return.  Indeed, when I return, my reality will be other.  Therein lies the generation of adventure:  finding that new otherness in the community.  New, but always imbued with the memories of the past.  Though some, and for many reasons, would have us ignore the past and not look backward, it is impossible to be "out of the flow" for very long.  I am not independent of my past, though I may re-arrange it into different layers of meaning and affect and thereby transform my usefulness in the community.  The adventure, the "kicking off the dust" is an essential mechanism - actual or virtual, to enable the re-arrangement of the affects of decisions, defilements, and discernments of the past.  The lasting effects of adventure lie in the way I am able to bring in all the disparate elements of a moment into a cohesive narrative.  Over the course of this life time, I'm sure I've made a few flights out of water, consciously or not, and am still encouraged to pull all those threads together.  Whether it makes sense or not, is not for me to decide."

To be plucked out from the current forces the awareness of a transforming sensation.  If nothing else, the jolting to one's system is enough to affect a change, even if it is just momentary.  Such episodes arise and then pass away.  Memories of any particular one of them don't spring to mind.  Can they be termed "adventures"?  In a minimalist sense I suppose they can, since the consequences of experiences do layer themselves.  For the most part they are too short-lived to be retained in a cohesive narrative.  However, nothing is really "missed" since over time my increasingly personalized presence in the general flow of life endows my absence from it with a particularity that, when I do re-enter, I can indeed objectify as "adventure".  Such a proposition may provoke objections, not the least of which would be that only significant persons have adventures, to which I might reply that indeed, in terms of the community's knowledge of itself its identity is colored by the experiences of its leaders.  The narrative of the lasting effects of an adventure lie therefor in the quality of the transformative events of a particular "moment out of the current".  So:  is there a hierarchical presumption as to the quality of affect of one's actions?  Modern thought would presumably answer that this is no longer a valid question.  In a time of global connectivity, the communal recording of events is just that:  communal and unidentifiable in a global narrative.

The truly particular - outstanding - episode is that of one person's transformative adventure.  The models for such a statement stand out at important junctures of mankind's history.