Warning, this is a bit “entreprenuer-grindset” of me to write. So if I sound naive at all I promise you everything was written with the context and understanding of the privileges I’ve been afforded throughout my life.
Pen-hits-paper sounds romantic, but in reality fingers-hit-keyboard on August 22nd at 9:09 PM in a hotel 5 minutes from the Berlin Airport. The temperature is a cool 19.5 degrees celsius and I write with a slight arc to avoid re-opening a cut on my left hand. This might be my first night of good sleep in weeks, so bear in mind that proper grammar is far out of focus (not that it ever really is).
The last 3 days were spent on a boat, traveling the Islands of Croatia, which definitely sounds a bit douchey (how tf do you spell douchey?) and over-the-top. However, the opportunity presented itself in one of the most serendipitous, incredible ways, and it’s had me thinking a lot about life paths.
In my mind I see life as a tree-diagram, where every decision you make leads you to even more decisions. There’s really no right or wrong path to choose, but what’s cool is that everyone’s path ends up being entirely unique. In the same way that no two snowflakes are the same, I think there’s something special to that.
Life in the past year has been flooded by a set of ridiculous situations and scenarios I’ve fallen into. From finding myself sleeping on benches in Switzerland, to an Island in Croatia with a dude I just met (who quit his job because of fruit), life has slowly been making less and less sense.
And so, it’s here in the Moxy Hotel at 9:34 pm that I’ve come to fully accept that by taking a more unconventional path, you begin opening up your life to options that exist lightyears away from where you started.
See in this tree of life, there’s a central path that we’re all born with, a set of conditioned decisions that we can’t control. Think grooves on a sledding hill. Whether it’s environmental or situational, there’s always a path that seems the most clear. The least blurry, the most straightforward, where you can see the direct outcomes of each decision you make. However, turn your boat a few degrees to the left and in a year you might find yourself exposed to a whole new set of options.
And so, as we began to tell friends about Croatia and how we ended up on this boat, I found to realize just how ridiculous the story sounded.
Here we were, a group of friends who met online 2 years ago, with another new friend who had just quit his job (because of fruit), all on a boat in the Adriatic sea, surrounded by 300 other people from all over the world. This event is called Yacht week, it sound pretentious, but is a really cool experience in which 300 people take to the sea to adventure (but really party) and have a good time.
Fingers-hit-keyboard once again on September 26th at 11:27 AM. I’ve been back in the states for a month now - moved into a new home in Austin, Texas. I’d say I have full memory and context of what this essay was originally about. However, memory has been reduced to the short, 10 second skim of the page (i ain’t reading all dat again).
There’s this old Greek tale called the Ship of Theseus, I’m not going to go into a huge lecture about the story, I’d encourage you to look it up yourself. However, there’s a point to be made about change and when we become new people.
From the point I left the US, to the point I returned - I feel like a totally different person. However, if you were to ask me what I learned from Europe - I’d tell you the same things everyone says:
- Slow living
- New perspectives
- Open world view
Change exists in how you carry yourself, the energy you bring to a room, and the weathered feel that your words now hold. Change isn’t something that you experience once you learn 10 new things about yourself, but it’s an ever evolving process that lives in the spaces between.
All this to say, that within myself I see a lot of the Ship of Theseus. Someone who ventured off into a far world, exchanging parts of myself for new ideas and connections, someone who changed and grew as a person not knowing of the moment that change occurred.
Someone who is fully content in letting the wind of the world take him to uncharted territory.