The Price of Curiosity and Adventure: Remember to Live Your Own Stories

A silhouette of a girl steps into the enchanting depths of a mystical forest, guided by the glow of the crescent moon and shimmering stars.

The Price of Curiosity and Adventure: Remember to Live Your Own Stories

There is always a price for curiosity. That first step past the garden gate, the moment we heed the call of the unknown—it changes everything. In my short story "The Enchanted Forest," our protagonist’s journey begins with a simple, innocent act: chasing a bird. A game, a moment of wonder. And yet, as in so many tales, the smallest of curiosities leads to the greatest of consequences.

This pull of curiosity and consequence into the web of adventure is the heart of fantasy. We see it in Tolkien’s Bilbo, who only wished for a quiet life and yet found himself standing before a dragon. In Robin Hobb’s, Fitz, whose childhood choices entangled him in a fate he never imagined. Curiosity is the spark of every grand adventure. But it’s also a double-edged sword. There is danger in adventure. Time lost. Innocence traded for wisdom. A world both larger and more terrifying than we ever expected.

A brave young adventurer soars through the skies on her majestic dragon, exploring vast landscapes beneath the clouds.

And that is why stories matter. They remind us that the world is vast and full of doors. But here’s the thing: if we only ever read about them, we become prisoners of our own making. The fey world our protagonist stumbles into is timeless, beautiful, and yet stagnant. Without the forward march of change, there is no true life—only an illusion of it. And that is the great paradox of fantasy readers, of dreamers and seekers alike. We turn the pages and lose ourselves, but if we never step beyond our own walls, if we never take our own first steps into the unknown, we become trapped in a realm where time only moves with the flip of a page.

One of my favorite bloggers Seth Godin would tell us that to live boldly means to do more than just consume stories—we must create our own. To engage with the world, to risk something real. It’s easy to believe we are adventurers when we have lived a thousand lives in books. But if we never put pen to paper in the story of our own lives, we have only lived through echoes of others.

This is the challenge:

Go. Explore. Make mistakes. Find your enchanted forest. Remember to live your own stories.

Otherwise, you may wake one day to realize that you have spent a lifetime reading about adventure but forgot to live the most important one. . . your. And that would be a tragedy.

Because in the end, no story is ever written in the absence of life.