072 – Adventure Series: Confusion & Clarity [Acadia]

Sarah Tacy [00:00:00]:
Hey there. Welcome. You are tuned in to the summer of adventure series here at Threshold Moments, where I am sharing bits and pieces of what it means to call in to your life a little bit of adventure. As Mischa Schuler would say, there’s possibly adversity and venture that not everything will go exactly as planned. And how do we take those elements of clarity and confusion to help learn more of what brings us alive and who we are. I hope you enjoy this. And please know that this particular series comes out twice a week. So if you want to be notified within your podcast app, please subscribe by pressing the little plus button up in the right hand corner, and you will be notified when these little 20 to 30 minute episodes come out.

Sarah Tacy [00:00:55]:
Enjoy. And if it is fitting for this stage for you and your life, may you find adventure And in your adventures, big or small, may you find yourself. Hello. Welcome. I’m Sarah Tacy, and this is Threshold Moments, a podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown and the pull feels real. Together, we share our grief, laughter, love, and life saving tools. Join us.

Sarah Tacy [00:01:45]:
Hello, and welcome to the Summer of Adventure. This is a series on Threshold Moments. What is unique here is that we will be having short episodes come out twice a week. So if you wanna get notification of when the Sarah episode comes out, subscribe to the show, which is just a little plus mark in the upper corner of the show page. And you’ll get noticed, not on your emails, but just on your podcast of the next time an adventure series comes out. And I just wanna say that the purpose of having something about adventure come out is that it is the summer season, which is a season of generally more energy, more likelihood of getting outside, possibility of taking some time off. And for me, I had an adventure threshold this year. And that came about when you listen to my Scotland series, you’ll hear that came about when I had this moment again.

Sarah Tacy [00:02:48]:
It seems to be a midlife moment that has repeated a few times of, what do I even like? What brings me alive? And letting my reticular activating system light up to that question and look for any clues without being hyper vigilant around it either. Right? Like once your unconscious is on the lookout for something you’ve named that you wanna know more about it, you just start seeing that information everywhere. So part of the answer to that question was being around more women. And part of the answer was adventure. After getting home from the Scotland trip, I went to a Beltane celebration at one of my friend’s houses and she had this big fire going and maybe it’s like smaller one that we were jumping over. And as you jump over the fire, you are supposed to name, type to yourself or out loud, something that you want to bring into your life. Something that in the season where all the flowers and plants are going to be nurtured and then come to bloom and come to harvest later in the summer, what do we want to nourish that have to come to harvest? And I just had this feeling like, I just want more adventure in my life. And I will say that I heard that the word, I think it’s from Misha Schuler.

Sarah Tacy [00:04:16]:
She’s a local herbalist. I first heard from her that adventure is like the word adversity and venture. So that adventure isn’t always crystal clear of how it’s going to look every step along the way. There are unknown parts that may bring some adversity that may ask you to solve some problems that you’ve never solved before. It’s going to most likely ask you to see things that are unknown. And when we go into unknowns, we learn more about the world and about ourselves. There is something so beautiful about stability and about routine that is so settling to our nervous system, but we grow through challenge. And any athlete would most likely be able to tell you, or at least a really good trainer would be able to tell you that as important as lifting the weights, doing the sprints, running the hills is the recovery time.

Sarah Tacy [00:05:27]:
And just as important as having ample recovery time, which would be like, here’s what I know. Here’s having something that is predictable, would be having moments of adventure, moments of unknown. I may have said before, you may have heard me say that I used to work 80 hours a week doing research and development for athletes, and we would want them to be fully rested, which is like, maybe a goal for our society is that more of us have opportunity to be rested. We would want to be fully rested and then learn a new pattern, learn something that’s challenging, learn something that’s hard. Maybe we fall to our knees and that maybe it’s not a success right away. And then we take recovery time, and then we try again, and recovery time, and try again. So as I amplify here the importance of adventure to also say there’s space for both. And I think when our lives become out of alignment with this balance of perhaps a more yang energetic out there learning something new in the yin, nurturing empty space is just at the both end.

Sarah Tacy [00:06:48]:
So today with the adventure, I want to open it up with my trip to Acadia. This was such a special trip. It was my daughter’s school, which is an incredible school. Jackie Gallo was on Threshold Moments earlier last year. You can look up her episode. She is the head teacher of roots and all of the teachers that she has hired are amazing human beings. Amazing. And one of these amazing teachers, her name, Sophie, planned this trip to Acadia National Park, and the kids had activities to do and sit spots to sit in and archaeological findings to discover and museums to visit.

Sarah Tacy [00:07:37]:
And they were so engaged and they were so on. And parents came to chaperone, and there were songs by the campfire and community coming together to put food together and going out to the rocks to watch the sunrise or sunset. And in the middle of the day, when the kids were off with their teachers, we actually had some free time. And something really cool happened, which is they’re like, Hey, free time, which I didn’t realize we’re gonna have. And you could go on these variety of hikes. And some people were like, I’m going off to here. And some people knew Acadia better. And I’ll be at this beach.

Sarah Tacy [00:08:17]:
I’ll be on this hike. And I was there with my friend, Ginny. I was like, My GPS isn’t working. Let’s, you know, let’s see what happens. And so this goes back to the idea of clarity and confusion. Are you willing, if you were to join me in this possibility of inviting adventure into your life, are you willing to have some confusion, sometimes a frustration? So day 1 on our own is that we had heard about a few trails and, you know, we pull up to a booth, we ask for a map. I can’t tell the difference between the roads that run through the national park and the actual roads. And we pull over for help a few times and the answers aren’t so helpful.

Sarah Tacy [00:09:11]:
But eventually we find our way to this hike and the hike ends up being so short. And I felt like we spent 3 times as long trying to find it in our car as we got to spend hiking. And one of our friends has a house on this island and it’s not quite near where we are. And again, GPS not working. Eventually we make our way there and we get there and she has an outdoor sauna that’s wood fired. And we’re like, oh, shoot. The house is locked. Oh, shoot.

Sarah Tacy [00:09:47]:
There’s no electricity on, and we need to go to the bathroom. And, oh, shoot. And there’s no water. And we don’t know how to get in, and we don’t have a lighter to start this this wood burning sauna. And, you know, we eventually find a key and kinda break into the house and that’s being completely renovated, you know. And so we find some, like, scraps of wood, and we’re about to give up. And under, like, near an old fireplace, I find a little lighter and some matches and some dirty tissues, or maybe they’re paper towels, and we start this fire. And again, we barely like, by the time it heats up, we’re in there for 10 minutes.

Sarah Tacy [00:10:28]:
And so what becomes really clear is that without clarity, things tend to take a lot longer and there’s a lot less time doing the thing you want to do. And it can feel frustrating. I had moments where I was feeling frustrated. But, also, when we found all the various pieces we would need to create a fire, something very primal happened in me. Whereas, Oh my God, we created a fire. And we kept feeding the fire with, like, and we’d collecting sticks from around the property and finding a way out to get down to the ocean to do a dip, and then having to nature pee, and it did something for me. You know? There was that, I think, the adventure part and the not knowing did something. And when my friend Ginny reminded me that I had asked for adventure and I was like, oh, shoot.

Sarah Tacy [00:11:23]:
Is this adventure? This is what I wanted? And the next day guys, I have a reputation for being real bad with directions. The next day, Ginny was following me. Like, I learned the roadmap and we wanted to do a specific run. And I was able to I’m like, Okay. I know. And then we’re gonna take a left out of here. And I could, like, know which roads cut across the island, which one kind of landed us on a different peninsula, how to get around, which ones were the loop of the national park. I learned a lot by first not knowing and taking a step when I was unsure because I don’t know if you’re like me at all, but there was a part of me that’s like, maybe I’ll just stay at the campground.

Sarah Tacy [00:12:12]:
There’s a part of me that could be really stuck and just like, I don’t know my way around here. My GPS isn’t working. So and maybe I just will, like, walk around here. So when you when calling an adventure to say, like, I will take a step. I don’t know what step will happen after. I will take a step and we’ll see what happens. And it may be frustrating and it may be fulfilling. And the next Tacy, I was so proud of myself.

Sarah Tacy [00:12:40]:
I found my way to Jordan’s pond. Janine and I did a 3 mile run around the loop. I don’t generally love running. And this was like jumping over boulders and on small wooden boardwalks. And there’s a lake all around us and mountains. And I felt so let up and having some clarity. So the first day was confusion. The Sarah day is clarity.

Sarah Tacy [00:13:04]:
Confusion is potential. Clarity is power. Clarity gave us so much more time to enjoy the things we wanted to enjoy. Now we knew how to get to my other friend’s house. So we went for this run. We knew how much time we had. We were able to get to my friend’s house. We knew where the lighter was.

Sarah Tacy [00:13:24]:
We knew where the wood source was. We knew how to get this fire started. We’re able to get the fire started, eat something, jump in the ocean, have a little more time before we then had to make it to the other side of the island to meet up with our girls. And each part, like following a map, I felt so, so let up by being able to find my way without a GPS. And I do want to say that there is a show that I recently watched. Is it Chris Hemsworth? The guy who plays Thor. He found out that he has the gene for Alzheimer’s. And so they did this whole, maybe it was like a 6 series show with him where he does one where it’s cold exposure, but of course, he’s going to the Arctic with Doctor.

Sarah Tacy [00:14:14]:
Peter Attia and his buddies and muscle memory and strength in a way where he’s over a cliff, over a gorge, climbing a rope 200 meters. But one was on memory. And this doctor who I believe was from Stanford was saying that a huge part of our brain and our memory and our orientation skills have started to dwindle and how important they are. And so his task was to go into what I think was the Australian Outback. I don’t know that landscape so well. I imagine it to be more dry. And in the show, it was very lush, wet, green. And the doctor said, This is where we’re putting you in.

Sarah Tacy [00:15:07]:
This is where you’re coming out. Let’s look at the maps. Let’s find your way through. Let’s orient you. But then it was rainy and there was no way to gauge by the sky what direction was what. And he and his friend had to make it through this 3 day trek to get to an exit point. And she was saying how much that stimulates our brain in a really positive way. I will just say I was very turned on by not having a GPS and having an old story in my head that I am not great at navigation and being able to find various points throughout the day with clarity.

Sarah Tacy [00:15:52]:
And that’s all I have for this episode. It’s this invitation to you to possibly pit play with confusion and clarity, potential and power, things that are not time saving, and things that are fast and clear, trying things where you don’t know what’s going to show up, the adversity in the venture, and how this is part of our growth. And how so often when we do things that we aren’t pros at is when our brain and our ability to know ourselves better has an opportunity to grow. I will also say that as my family starts using a boat more often, and my husband, who is currently the captain, gets more and more comfortable. That part of the stress goes down. So thank you for clarity and comfort. But then we can take adventures that are even longer, that challenge it in a different way. As I close out with a blessing, a reticular activating system activation, May I have some patience on the days where there’s more confusion than clarity? May I know that it is the preparation for a life that is about to grow in ways that I just don’t know yet.

Sarah Tacy [00:17:34]:
May I enjoy the times in my life where clarity presents opportunities to spend more time in the things I love and more clarity in the directions that I want to go. I have so much gratitude for those moments. May this summer give plenty of opportunity for adventure that brings joy and growth and connection to myself, to my family, to my friends, and definitely to nature and spirit. Welcome to this Threshold Moments series of summer adventure. And if it feels right to you, please say a little show me or may I statement for yourself on what you would love to call in this summer, adventure or otherwise. Thank you for tuning in. It’s been such a pleasure. If you’re looking for added support, I’m offering a program that’s totally free called 21 days of untapped support.

Sarah Tacy [00:18:44]:
It’s pretty awesome. It’s very easy. It’s very helpful. You can find it at sarah tacey.com. And if you love this episode, please subscribe and like. Apparently, it’s wildly useful. So we could just explore what happens when you scroll down to the bottom. Subscribe, rate, maybe say a thing or 2.

Sarah Tacy [00:19:05]:
If you’re not feeling it, don’t do it. It’s totally fine. I look forward to gathering with you again. Thank you so much.