that resides in the new and unknown that stirs the soul to life. Adventure flings doors open and shines light into the neglected and forgotten depth of life. It shakes the cobwebs from our habitual routines and creates space for possibilities.

It’s why I can’t stay away.

I always feel more alive in the moment-by-moment unfolding of life because I am more awake to new opportunities and prepared to respond to them spontaneously. I’m less boundaried by my plans or limiting beliefs about how things can or should go.

And from personal experience, opportunities tend to be more abundant beyond security & certainty. The more you remove barriers between you and the things that could and may come knocking on your door, the wider the opening becomes.

Serendipity doesn’t wait outside the locked gates and closed doors of our lives; it looks for openings.

Adventure is a choice to say yes to something that is risky or unexpected. It always creates an opening, and sometimes several. Sometimes it breaks every wall around your life until you become so open that every experience and new encounter is an opening.

Doorways.

And where will they lead?
Who might you meet there?
What opportunities will flow in?

You have to say yes first before you discover any of these answers.

That’s the gamble you take.

dark-lit bar in Seward, Alaska filled with maroon, leather love seats and a velvet-lined bar-top. Antique liquor bottles are silhouetted by backlights in a showcase that makes up each of the restaurant’s walls. Above the lounge are six apartments, one of which my grandma Marsyd and mom lived in when she was 14 years old before someone started a fire in the hallway and they left the small fish town of Seward for good.

The details of my family’s history in Alaska have fell into the cracks that form in the storylines involving affairs and shame. But I can easily paint an image in my mind of my grandma sitting at one of the leather-buttoned barstools.

It’s 1963 in Seward, a year before two big events: my mom’s birth and the magnitude 9.2 Great Alaskan earthquake. She’s around the age I am now. I imagine her hazel eyes framed with bright blue eyeshadow; a cigarette balancing between her pointer and middle fingers decorated with long, acrylic nails. 

A gin martini with two kalamata olives sits on the bar in front of her (my six-year-old self would later call it dirty water) 

when a man younger than she catches her eye. She lifts the cigarette to her mouth, squinting her piercing eyes to meet his as smoke billowed from her lips.

Marsyd came to life when someone gave her attention, so I imagine it took just a single wink to convince her to have an affair that led to the life of a dark-haired baby girl who would walk into Thorn’s Showcase Lounge 53 years later with me, her daughter. That’s the first time I saw Alaska. Four years after that I’d be serving tourists at the same restaurant tables and velvet bar top.

Sometimes when I leave the restaurant late at night—when the midnight sun is setting and the town is quiet—I’m filled with a sense of deep curiosity about what this town means to me. Can there be pieces of our souls left in the places that have played a critical role in our very existence?

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to Alaska—not to hike mountains or wait tables in a dark-lit bar imprinted with the presence of the women in my family—but to discover what more this place holds to satisfy the curiosities of my own identity.