so far

“You have gone so far from who you are just to find yourself.”

These words were spoken to me on the evening of my first attempt at surfing in September of 2020, by a person who just met me earlier that same day. I had been bouncing around during the pandemic, hopping between friends’ houses and camping in the woods since my housing was tied to a job in southern California that ended with the shutdown in late March.

After a stay with friends in Savannah and a few nights in the mountains of northern Georgia, I decided I wanted to learn how to surf. I had been thinking about trying it out for a few years, though I had always put off the thought until after I “finished” with my mission.

The mission: To unite the world.

Simple enough, right? I would be surfing in no time, and in a united world too!

While sitting on a hillside by a river in the southern Appalachian mountains, a question popped into my head:

Why should I wait?

I decided that I don’t have to wait to enjoy my life. I packed up my camp that day and headed to a place called Surf City, North Carolina. I might as well hit the nail right on the head!

Although there have been rough patches in every single one of my journeys, I believe that the lessons are worth the struggle. Though I don’t have much of a choice in the matter because I certainly can’t return the experience and exchange it for another. During those periods of difficulty, I often found solidarity and comfort in song lyrics and other quotes, especially when they rhyme. I heard this one for the first time while living in my car at the beach:

I almost lost hope, but I didn’t. Had to learn things the hard way.
How to cope with the mission, sometimes it feels so far away.
And the vision that I followed didn’t play out how I saw it,
But the message and the lessons manifested into knowledge.

“I almost lost hope, but I didn’t.” What a powerful statement! As a person who has felt hopeless at times, I can feel the relief and pride that comes from the second half of that statement. “…didn’t play out how I saw it” struck me because I was not planning on living nomadically again, but the pandemic seems to have shaken up a lot of people’s lives and pushed us all to where we are now. If things went exactly as we expected, life might become boring!

---

Experiences are better when shared.

For me, that phrase means at least two things: the first is that experiences that are shared can connect people; the second is that stories told are often better than the experience itself.

With that in mind, this blog is dedicated to sharing my experiences and knowledge with you. I hope that you will see me as a close friend as I share my stories with you. In addition to stories of adventures and lessons learned through them, I intend to show you the various sides of me that can sometimes feel very disconnected.

This story begins in my final year at the University of North Carolina when I realized that everything is connected. Of course, there are plenty of stories and lessons that happened before that moment, but I’m going to treat those as prequels to the main story.

I was student-teaching high school science at the time and was amazed at the questions that these kids would ask me. It is all too true that you don’t really understand a subject until you can teach it. My students would ask me questions that I couldn’t answer at the time. These questions would spark my curiosity and bring me to learn about the connectedness of the different disciplines so that I could more simply explain the answer to them. I fell in love with the idea that all of our understanding of the universe is interconnected. Even thinking about it brought me and still brings me indescribable joy.

I came to understand that we separate subjects into disciplines and categories to better learn/teach them but that those categories don’t really exist. Everything is related and connected and humans create the separations. Just as we have separated nature into different disciplines of science, I have separated myself into different roles that I play at different times in my life. While plenty of people have told me I have to focus my energy on one thing at a time, I can’t seem to give up wanting to play all the roles, and all at the same time too.

I began my teaching career as a high school science teacher in the Bay area of California, while simultaneously trying to create my own curriculum to teach the interconnectedness of everything. If you’re looking to burn out quickly, I highly recommend trying to create a curriculum as a first year teacher, thousands of miles from your friends and family.

I was limited to presenting my ideas through the lens of “Chemistry class” or “Biology class” which frustrated me. I wanted to teach my students how all of the sciences were connected but I quickly realized it would be impossible in that setting. The stresses and limitations within the educational system really cannot be understood until you see it for yourself!

I shifted my path to focus on putting this idea that “everything is connected” on paper. I decided it was best to present the idea as an interconnected website/textbook. This could allow people to follow their own thoughts to see the deep connections between everything, or so I thought.

The website quickly turned into a representation of what it’s like to live in my brain. Readers could jump between sections so quickly that it was easy to forget what they were reading. When my dad tried to read it, he told me that he found himself with seventeen tabs open but hadn’t completely read even a single section. Clearly, the message was not shared as I had hoped.

The process of compiling all that information was exhausting. I took a mental break from writing by working as an Outdoor Educator where I met some of the most free and interesting people I had met in my life so far. One night, a coworker (somewhat sarcastically) shouted, “Man, I’m done with society! I’m just gonna buy some solar panels and a water filter and go live in the woods!”

I doubt he had any idea how much those words influenced me. I spent the early part of the summer that year living out of a tent and my small car in the forests of California. I learned countless lessons while living in the forests. Later that summer, I finished the written portion of my online textbook and then returned for another season at outdoor school. While working as an outdoor educator, I was able to share some ideas from the textbook with my pre-teen students and, to my satisfaction, they completely understood! They even told me that I need to become a motivational speaker!

Spending most of my time in nature and away from “society” became a bit addictive, much like the “travel bug.”  I eventually managed to get myself a van to live in and traveled around the eastern and central regions of the USA for about seven months. Looking back, I can see that I had more freedom than I even knew what to do with!

With an isolated and “free” perspective, I grew to see the world in a very different way than the norm and even how I used to see it. I began to view myself as some “alien nerd” who had no desire to engage with humans in real life despite having studied them intensely enough to write a textbook about how them! I wrote drafts of essays during this time and inexplicably decided to keep them all to myself. On this site, I will be posting updated versions of some of those essays.

In keeping my thoughts to myself, I grew further apart from humanity. I was so passionate about humans and how amazing we are while writing the textbook but my experience traveling around proved how idealistic I was. At first, I was adamant that we can live up to our potential but most people that I met disagreed with me; that felt even more alienating.

In growing apart from humans, I have grown away from a part of myself. I grew to hate humans and therefore I grew to hate a part of myself. It is impossible to hate something that one does not feel passionately about. I have spent far more time than I want hating parts of this world, but it is only because I have so much love for this world and the potential that we can reach.

I was not angry at people for not intensely exploring themselves like I do, but rather I was saddened that they didn’t even want to explore. I have spent hundreds of passionate hours researching and writing about this world and its amazing inhabitants. I have probably spent even more time wishing to not be a part of it.

I have traveled so far from the person I once was, without much intention behind those travels. There has not been much of a plan beyond the basic idea of spreading that idea: everything is connected. In the process, I have discovered so much about the world and myself.

“An unexamined life is not worth living.” -Socrates

Although self-exploration can grant life-saving insights, there have been countless times when I desperately tried to avoid it. Another nomad I met once told me, “The road is a companion. When you don’t want to be alone, you can just drive. And you won’t have to think about anything else until you get there.” While my travels have been necessary to accumulate experiences, they always presented a way for me to avoid exploring who I truly am.

I am done feeling separated into different roles, especially since I am the only one doing the separating.
I am done hiding my true and complete self, especially since I am the only one holding me back.
I am done keeping my thoughts to myself and feeling disconnected from the people, especially since those people are so much more similar to me than I have been willing to admit.

I am ready to discover who I truly am and share it with you. I hope that my stories can help you to better explore yourself and see the beauty in the world that we so often ignore. Experiences are better when shared because I can choose to focus on the beauty.