Rain water trickles down my sleeve, inside the back of my glove and sends a chill up my forearm. From my experience in the outdoors, wet gloves means cold hands and that’s a bad thing.

Pause to assess the situation.

I’m on my bike and it’s raining hard but I’m only a couple of miles from home. Frost bite ain’t an issue today and all I need from my digits is the crude ability to grip the break levers.

A large puddle lies ahead of me and I swerve – not to avoid it but, instead, to roll straight through the middle of it. It’s raining and I want to have some fun

-

I suspect you’re reading this inside a building. I imagine you have a radiator on somewhere and it wouldn’t surprise me if the windows were closed too. Perhaps you drove to work this morning with the heaters or air conditioning on or walked the few hundred yards to the shops wrapped up in a woolly hat and gloves, or beneath an umbrella in a Gore-tex jacket.

We may not yet have machines that can control the weather but modern life has certainly tamed it. We turn dials, select garments and adapt plans to work around meteorology but in so doing I fear we move ourselves one step further away from the world we inhabit, from nature.

This month, dear readers, I request that you embrace the elements. I ask that the next time you see sunshine you fling open your windows and drink in its rays. I beg humbly that when it rains you cower not beneath your brickwork shelters but instead charge into the downpour and jump into puddles with both feet. Should the temperature plummet, then please, for me, jog around the block in shorts and sandals, feel the icy air fill first your nostrils and then your lungs.

Won’t we get cold?

Shan’t we be soaked through?

…and then what? What is so bad about the cold? What happens after you get wet? Half way up Everest these are bad states to be in. Running through your local streets with a grin on your face, they are not. Better, surely, to feel the cold and feel alive than the opposite?

You will get cold, you will get wet, you will feel the sun’s powerful heat and nature’s almighty wind. Your actions will fly in the face of modern life and that, that, is exactly what we strive for. Withdrawal from the sterile world of modern life and a momentary reconnection with raw, with pure, with wild.

This month, if just for one day, don’t fight the elements. Embrace them.

Enjoying the pungent aroma of a fellow Tube rider’s sweaty armpit thrust across your face. Sat in static traffic so long that the radio starts repeating songs you heard earlier. Watching your breath as you shiver waiting for a bus that should have been here, ooh, a good half hour ago now.

Commuting is a drag.

Not only do you have to endure all of the above but you’re not even trying to get somewhere you want to go. It’s not like fighting crowds to escape Brighton having cycled there from London or a sleepless night in a coach on your way to the ski slopes. No, you’re going to work.

Getting to and fro your job can be tiresome but not this month, soldiers. Not in the month of March, in the year of 2010. This month, on the streets of the UK, across Europe and the world over, we march purposefully on our way to offices. This month, loyal troops, we race excitedly to our workplaces. This month, we commute with gusto!

Some ideas:

• Take a new route – Dig out a map and plot a novel course (or just go blind) ; follow a sat nav (even if you’re walking/cycling); try a different bus/train/Tube combination
• Walk/run/cycle to work – Whatever you’re not used to, try that (and if you do all of them, use motorized transport for the novelty). Too far? You don’t have to do it every day, just give it a go once. Set your alarm 30 minutes earlier, or an hour, or four hours if you have to.
• Slow down, go sightseeing – What interesting places do you pass on your way to work? Or, more to the point, what interesting places do you miss every single day as you pass by in an early morning mental fug? Take it easy. Take it slow. Look around you and see life from the other side of the street. Leave earlier and embrace your journey as an experience not a chore.
• Make it fun – Do it with a friend. Treat yourself to a new book/album on the MP3 player/coffee on the way. Put your jacket and wellies on and splash in the puddles (rather than whinge about the weather). Treat the journey as if you were going somewhere new or on holiday and maybe it’ll set your day off to a better start.

Some answers to your excuses:

• I know the best way already – Boo for you! Is life really about efficiency? This is the very thing we are trying to address this month – turning the commute from a necessity to a pleasure. Just once.
• I don’t have time – Yes you do, you’re just sleeping when it goes by. Sure, it’s already a traumatic experience when the alarm goes off at the normal time but who ever achieved anything great without first putting in a little hard work? It’s a one off. Get out of bed and get to it.
• There’s only one bus/train/road/cycle lane – Oh, come now, is that the best you can do? Get off the bus a stop early. Walk to the next railway station from home. Deliberately drive the wrong way and see where you end up. Ride your bike on the road, run it along the pavement, find a dirt track or a field to cross. Use your imagination!

You know the drill by now. Stop reading this and get a map out. Plan your adventure and report back to me on the comments form below or on the Facebook page within the month.

Now, what are you waiting for…? Go have an adventure!

This is an Everyday Adventure…

…and it is here for you to try.

There are no rules, constraints or conditions. Treat this as a spark for your imagination. Use it as an injection of excitement into your daily routine.

Please spread the word, email a link to this page or share it on Twitter and Facebook with the buttons at the bottom right. There’ll be a new idea for each month of 2010 along with another fantastic image courtesy of David Tett Photography.

I’m quite excited about my plan for this evening’s Everyday Adventure. I wish I could tell you what it is but I can’t. Not just just yet, anyway. If I pull it off then I promise to add it in the comments box tomorrow morning. But anyway, this isn’t about me. It’s about you…

How did you sleep this month?

Back at the start of February I gave you a brief: to camp in your living room, sleep with the windows and curtains open, wake beneath the stars, swap your duvet for a sleeping bag and generally recreate a bit of child-like excitement when it came to your night’s sleep.

I’ll be honest, in comparison to the great response I got after the Lunchtime Jailbreak in January, this month has been comparatively quiet. Did you not give this one a go? Or were you just a bit shy about telling me what you got up at bed time? Comments below or on the Facebook page please!

I did, however, hear of a tent pitched in a back garden on a school night and the promise of a living room fort all the way from South Korea. I had a few interesting bedroom spots on my £100 adventure last week (see the photos here) but set out specifically for an Everyday Adventure the night before my first school talk. Wanting to put my money where my mouth was before preaching to a hall full of young people, I shunned my cosy bedroom in favour of a bivi bag and some bushes just up the road from my house.

Monday will see another Mission Possible for your daily life uploaded here. That means you have three more nights to squeeze in an overnight adventure and let me know what you got up to.

Right, I’m off to have an adventure…