For most of my adult life, adventure meant movement — and I’ve had plenty of it. Dental clinics in Cambodia, Kathmandu, and Guatemala. Family adventures to beautiful and exotic places. New hobbies that pull me into deep dives. My friends tease me about that — once I find something new, I go all in. I’ve found new rivers to wade in, bigger fish to catch, new mountain trails to climb, new faces to meet, new conversations that light up the air with laughter, insight, and connection. I am blessed.
Yet I realize now that I was always moving toward something — a new experience, a new horizon, a new version of myself waiting just around the bend. A new relationship into which I could pour my love. That momentum kept me alive for decades. It gave me purpose, energy, a reason to keep saying yes.
But lately, I’ve begun to wonder if I mistook movement for life itself.
At a Modern Elder Academy workshop on the warm Baja coast, led by the founder Chip Conley, I took a deeper look at my life’s arc through the lens of the Hero’s Journey. Chip, with his sweet, dimpled grin, gently probed each of us to draw on our own insights, to help us distill the lessons of our life’s arc, to find patterns within our story, to know ourselves better, and to gain wisdom, with the goal of sharing our wisdom for the greater good.
I noticed a recurring pattern in my own life: the thrill of the next thing — the next trip, the next hobby, the next connection — which once felt like expansion and growth. Now I see that it sometimes served as a way of avoiding the quieter truths sitting right here. There’s a certain fatigue that doesn’t come from exertion, but from chasing aliveness as if it lives somewhere else. I’ve begun to sense another kind of adventure — one that doesn’t require motion. The adventure of staying.
Each morning at MEA, our mindfulness guide Teddi led us in the simple practice of sitting still — feeling our bodies, letting go of the external pull of phones, work, possessions, busy minds, and constant distraction. How do we just be?
I know that stillness, especially when on the river with Bella, my sweet Lab, resting in the sand at my feet, breathing slowly as early light filters through the cottonwoods while the soft rushing of the river bathes my ears. Nothing is happening, yet everything is. I feel the pulse of nature — the wind through the willows, birds juking and diving to catch insects during the morning hatch, my heartbeat slowing to match nature’s rhythm, the rhythm of life. Just sitting, absorbing, observing, listening, being. Teddi reminded us that this stillness is always available.
The morning stillness practice felt like discovery — a new kind of edge. A softer edge. The quiet wasn’t empty; it was full. It carries the same sense of excitement I feel standing knee-deep in the river, fly rod in hand, casting into a deep blue pool, and waiting (praying!) for the first strike.
Only now the river was within me — flowing, alive, unpredictable, and clear. I realized I didn’t need to be on the river to feel its stillness. I can be still — anytime, anywhere.
It’s taken me years to understand that my curiosity — my drive to explore and experience — was simply energy looking for form. The trick now is to let that energy turn inward: to explore depth instead of distance, to see what happens when I stop collecting experiences and start inhabiting them.
I used to chase adventure, excitement, newness. Now I let it find me.
Stillness doesn’t come naturally to someone wired like me. The mind wants to move — to analyze, to plan, to escape discomfort or boredom by running toward the next new thing. But stillness softens the edges. When I stay with what’s here — the ache of loss, the quiet joy of a morning, the uncertainty that comes with being human — I find something more reliable than excitement. I find peace.
Presence itself is infinite terrain — as wild, unpredictable, and full of wonder as any mountain, sea, or river. The difference is that this adventure asks for patience. It asks for courage of a quieter kind.
So now I practice staying. When grief rises, I stay. When loneliness knocks, I open the door and let it sit down for a while. I am capable of sitting with intense feelings, letting them wash through me, instruct me. It’s real, its life, it’s what is. When joy visits, I don’t rush to hold it or post about it — I just breathe with it. When sadness arises, I simply notice I’m feeling sad. What’s this asking me to see? Neither feeling defines me, nor circumscribes me. Both passes. And I’m still sitting here — in stillness, in quietude, with no agenda.
The adventure isn’t in chasing these states but in allowing them to move through me — each one part of the larger landscape of my life.
The quiet adventure doesn’t announce itself. It begins in small moments: the soft light through a window, fog rolling in and rolling out the valley, the sound of Bella snoring, my body exhaling after a long sigh. It’s in the silence between thoughts, where life finally becomes intimate again. Real.
Stillness isn’t the absence of life; it’s where life finally reveals itself. When I stop searching for something more, the world shows me what’s been here all along — ordinary, sacred, alive.
The real adventure is here — in the quiet, in the now.
-Mark
Mark Bayless is a writer, pediatric dentist, and outdoorsman. Splitting time between Carmel Valley and Sun Valley, exploring what it means to live with presence, purpose and an open heart.