In your 20s and feeling “boxed in”? Feel an undeniable urge to “get missing for a little while”? Dreamed of taking a year to travel the world? Author Adam Shepard can not only relate – he did it.
One Year Lived is an engaging travelogue by this adventurous, late 20s guy from North Carolina.
It’s an entertaining account of his escapades in 11 countries, but more, it’s about what he learned along the way – about himself, and what he wanted his life to be about from the inside out.
Already with his life going along swimmingly – as author and motivational speaker – What motivated him to hit the international road for a year?
As he writes, “the biggest motivation…the deciding factor, was my seventy-year-old self. When one hits seventy, the dust and blur of his or her life clears and reflection sets in. Looking back from that point, would I be happy with the life I’d lived, with the decisions I’d made? Had I soaked up every moment? Did I matter? Had I made this world a little bit better? These aren’t easy questions, the answers either crushing or uplifting.”
Like any good adventure, it unfolded in its own way, the way it is supposed to, although we just don’t know it at the time. Visualize some of the slides: “I read seventy-one books…one—slowly—in Spanish; I worked with poor kids in Honduras…bungee jumped…went scuba diving; I learned about the reproductive organs of a chicken…spent a night with absinthe…I got robbed; I survived a bull in Nicaragua…I went to Rigoletto at the Státní opera in Prague and danced in the cage at a gay club in Barcelona at four in the morning; in Thailand I got a tattoo, rode an elephant, and then ate the best street food in the world; I grew a mustache and a mullet…I clicked a number of items off of the List o’ Good Times, but in the end, my most memorable experiences weren’t even on it.”
This is just the trailer. One thing for sure, when Shepard is really is 70 he’ll have a library of adventures to add to these. His will have been a life of someone who was not afraid to live fully – who said a big Yes to life.
In your 20s and is adventure calling? Read this book.
Better yet – say yes to the adventure calling you and read Shepard’s book along the way.