Re: Quest

Back in the day when I wrote for my local newspaper, The Timmins Daily Press, I would often make a request of my readers to take time to wonder. My column was filled with questions about life and all of its curiosities. It was my writerly responsibility, I pompously thought at the time, to encourage some mental adventuring amongst the Tim Horton’s coffee crowd.

In my youth I thought often of going on quests. In school I loved to learn of the seafarers who cast off the mooring lines of their home port to seek out riches in foreign lands. Education in the fifties and sixties was all about studying heroes who cruised the oceans looking for new found lands where resources were just ripe for the taking. I loved looking at reproductions of the maps used and routes charted by Prince Henry the Navigator, Magellan, Vasco de Gama, Drake and Cook. Textbooks of my time as a student contained scant information regarding the indigenous folk whose presence would be dismissed by these European explorers, as one might swat a bug while sipping Pina coladas at poolside.

We only learned about the upside to adventuring in history. Kings and Popes suggested that our Earth and Seas were a place to play, to conquer, to dominate. The world was ours for the taking and if anyone else was on the beach when we landed they’d better step aside unless they wanted to be part of the servant class within our colony. White English folk were good at this questing for things that already were part of another’s culture. But the swarthy Portuguese and Spanish had their say in their day. French and Dutch also sought the resources of distant lands without questioning whether the indigenous had an opinion. Early Norse folk were romanticized as Vikings in tales of discovery but their questing objective was also narrow; land was the prize! Those inhabitants with foreign coloured skin were merely chattel to be enslaved.

The fictional character Don Quixote as written by Miguel de Cervantes went on a quest; an impossible dream to right the wrongs of man. I feel his mission was more about searching for his inner compass than vanquishing evil but the idea may be the same. Watching a documentary on rock climber and media sensation Sasha DiGiulian made me wonder what motivates some folk to do risky things. Questers have always desired to be the first, the fastest or the most innovative. Creatives also can be defined as testing the boundaries of mental and physical forms.

I hope all my grandkids become adventurers. I want them to be brave and explore the limits of their world, perhaps expanding the realms of existence for all humankind. When I was a teacher I used to love it when one of my students discovered a fresh way of thinking or doing or being. Questing can be a wondrous pastime. Life is about finding a place for yourself, not a specific geographical location or a plot of land, but discovering your unique purpose.