Why start with a Quest?
Why we think Quests matter, plus a sneak peek of our Quest location at Elbow Lake
We start our yearlong program with a Quest — a weeklong hiatus in the wilderness.
🎥 Here’s Kevin with a little tour of Elbow Lake, Ontario, where we’ll host a Quest from Oct 20–25 — you can find out more and register here.
The Quest isn't simply an outdoor adventure. It’s an opportunity to practice standing at the edge of the unknown and responding not with fear but with aliveness, creativity, and collective sense-making.
This shift from worry to wonder involves a trainable set of skills. We help young people adopt a posture of authentic conversation with the unknown, navigating the thresholds between self and other, present and future, old world and new.
Here are 3 reasons we start with a Quest.
A retreat from everyday life helps you tune into what’s inside
Young people joining our program often struggle to lower the volume of all the shoulds and need-tos in their everyday lives.
Shifting contexts helps. In a fresh social and physical environment, it is easier to loosen habitual thinking and feeling and notice instead your own inner stirrings. The Quest affords the time and space to recognize and listen to intuition.
We introduce a practical philosophy called Neither/Nor to show young people the difference between two ways of knowing — abstract concepts (like “success”, “purpose”, and “the right career path”) and direct experience (what “success” feels like in your body after trying something hard with new friends, touching grass, tracing paths between stars in the night sky).
Throughout the week, in myriad ways, we practice seeing the world in both concepts and direct experience, and intentionally navigating between the two. This oscillation is a core wayfinding skill that can help young people meet complexity with more ease and curiosity, and a greater fluency in connecting their inner and outer worlds.
Nature approximates the sacred
While Liminal Learning doesn’t prescribe a values system, it most certainly encourages thinking about, feeling into, and paying attention to values.
Young people joining our program typically don’t need any encouragement, here — they care about living a “good life”, about feeling part of something greater than themselves.
Nature is a touchstone to the numinous.
“Everybody on the Quest was really quick to appreciate beauty, you know? And it would be something tiny, like, oh, this tree looks really nice in the sun right now. Or this part of the trail smells good. And it would be a fleeting moment. But I don't think there was one person there who wouldn't, experience that moment and then feel willing to share it with others.”
— Saif, 18
Nature is an excellent teacher; we mostly get out of her way, while providing various tools and exercises for discerning and sharing values.
The relational is the foundation of the possible
The quality of relationships formed on the Quest is a catalyst for everything that follows in our program.
As important as any budding friendship is the experience of a different way of relating — of being in a more direct, real, whole-body connection with oneself, one another, and nature. This is something like a collective reattunement — to the intelligence and welcome of being embedded in a small group, open to all that is:
“It was pretty amazing to meet people for the first time and then develop such a rapport with them, and then have them, just talk things out and be completely honest and earnest and vulnerable, which then, in turn, allowed me to be vulnerable… I absolutely did feel like I was seen, heard in an important way.”
— Griffin, 22
Such reattunement opens up what’s possible. When young people feel this in a radical way on the Quest, it becomes a template experience which we continue to draw on remotely in our curriculum in The Hub, implementing practices into our everyday lives. In particular, we deepen through practice the collective shift from worry to wonder.
Later in our program, we emphasize a different collective move — from wonder to worldbuilding. Via our Heist training and Heists, we help young people develop and ship collaborative projects and experiment with putting meaningful things into the world together.
Our Heists tend to hit differently than typical group projects largely because of relational foundation already cultivated within the cohort. With the shared Quest experiences, and the burgeoning skill of meeting the world with a posture of wonder, young people can build together with more joy, integrity, and purpose.