The Feeling

It was a dark stormy night when I first saw it. Hidden behind the canopies of a large oak tree. Why I was there in itself is an interesting story.

Leaving work that day huddled in the rumble of the busy streets, so close to passers by one wrong step and we would all tumble, I heard it.

Looking back it wasn’t a distinct sound. I wouldn’t say I heard someone call me name, no one stopped me and told me to do this. It was more a feeling. A feeling that if instead of walking to the train station, hopping on and going three stops before making the slow walk back to my apartment, I should continue along the street I was once on. Stopping only once I get to the edge of town, with the promise of an adventure lying ahead.

And so I did.

I made my way past the train station, up the Main Street and turning left at the post office; moving as one with the after work commuters. It was only there, at the edge of town when the last stragglers trickled out of sight that I felt it again. The overwhelming sense of urgency that I was standing at the forefront of my biggest adventure.

From there it was easy. Every turn and step forward guided by an unflinching gut feeling. And there it was. Hidden under the canopies of a large oak tree, a box. Now I had two options. The responsible adult in me, the one who wakes up at the crack of dawn every morning to drudge through the mundane acts of life wanted to turn around and go home. Leaving the box and it’s inexplicable calling behind. The other part however, the one who dreamed of dragons and fairies all the life was bursting at the seams to find out more.

You can guess which side won. So that settled it. With one deep breath; sucking in the air around with a brute force as if one tiny falter would cause havoc, I opened the box.

At first all I heard was silence. The defining emptiness of the atmosphere squeezing out every last particle of noise. Till I cracked. Laughing almost to the point of hysteria I looked down into the small box at the space in which I expected to find my biggest adventure to see nothing but a little black notebook.

In that moment to describe my feelings would be impossible. It wasn’t just that my soul was shattered as the very essence of my being diverted back to the slimy shell of an absent minded adult. No. It was more than that. It was as if every dream I once held of a greater purpose, a reason to get up each morning had been popped; stabbed by an invisible pin, now resembling a deflated balloon, sad and lonely on the ground.

It took every ounce of strength to not turn around in that very moment and rejoin the society I so despised. But instead, against all better judgement, I reached out my hand, shaking with inexcusable anger and picked the notebook up. Falling from the pages, what called me that gloomy night, my greatest adventure.

I waited a week, seven long painstaking days before I looked in the notebook once more. Still lying there, settled in the creases of every page the largest sum of money I had ever laid my eyes on.

I left the money haunting my dreams until the first light of summer daybreak. It was then, waking from a restless sleep that I realised my next steps. Adventure had always pursued me, or I did it. The idea that any second I could step away from the nonsensical meandering of life and fall head first into a story, an adventure like no other, had kept me going through every stage of my life. At that realisation I knew the greater purpose this adventure had given me.

7 months and 4 days from the moment I followed that inaudible feeling my plans had been set. My goal was to inspire, as I had been by my own imagination and then that little black notebook. I named it the escape. A range of small black notebooks to inspire the adventure in everyone around me.

Using the money found that fateful day my purpose was finally as clear as day.