Bold for the Autumn: Day 1
I like observing change.
Over the past two years I’ve run the same path along the Stillwater River almost everyday. I like to watch the last remnants of winter melt, freeze and melt again—revealing fragments of fiery leaves on their way to decomposition, still littering the forest floor. I like to watch small bits of green poke through those leaves and unfurl in the longer and warmer days. I welcome the beavers back. Or perhaps they welcome me back slapping their tails against the water in the newly melted river—the beavers most likely trying to scare me away. As spring progress and the trail is painted in green starting from the ground and working up, I watch one plant species grow strong and tall just to be overwhelmed by another in succession. I like losing myself in these small transformations. What I’ve failed to acknowledge is that in the years since I’ve been running I’ve been changing too. Just in less obvious ways.
I’ve always been a proponent of acknowledging change when it happens, but that takes dedicated time. It’s important to recognize who we’ve become and reflect on what we’ve experienced. Only when we take time to do so are we able to know what we need in the present moment to be happy. In the past four years, and in the last month especially, my life has changed in big ways, and small but often more important ways. Until now I’ve been too busy to take the time that I need to process. I’m lucky at this point in my life I have the flexibility to decompress and embark on a month long solo-drive across the United States.
My desire to go on a road trip began at the beginning of high school with a book and a person. The book being, Into the Wild and the person being my high school social studies teacher Lou Mroz. Into the Wild inspired me to take an adventure. I felt constrained by societal norms around me and Chris McCandless’ taught me I could escape them all by going out on my own and living off my own will. In my one-track high school brain I couldn’t understand the book’s final message that “happiness is only real when shared.” I’ve since learned differently, but my passion for taking an adventure alone persists.
After reading Into The Wild, I began talking to my high school social studies teacher, the late Lou Mroz, about the various trips he’d been on to Alaska and otherwise, as well as transcendentalism and feminism. I became intrigued by Ralph Waldo Emerson but often found that some of his philosophies contradicted my desire to set out to “find myself.” As Emerson writes in the essay “Self-Reliance,” “He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things.” I talked about these contradictions in my own morphing philosophies with Mr. Mroz.
As I graduated high school and moved on to a collegiate career in basketball, I felt more and more constrained by the life I was living. Mr. Mroz’s words always stayed with me however and the idea of a road trip became more of a distant but elaborate plan—a way to escape after I put in my four years.
In the meantime, before he retired, Lou Mroz gave students a handout with four philosophies one read:
“The greatest gift that we are given is life, no one knows for sure if there’s an after life. One thing I know for sure, I know what sorrow is and I know what happiness is, we have the power, we have the power to be happy.”
This sentiment was shared with me during my years as his student and stuck with me. I quit basketball and began reconstructing who I was and figuring out what I needed to be happy. A process that probably took two years.
After graduating and tying up a few loose ends, I realized I had the time to take my cross-country adventure. The night before Mr. Mroz passed away I thought to email him the next day telling him I was finally doing it. But I know his spirit will be with me on this journey.
Another Lou Mroz philosophy was:
“Find your passion, find what you enjoy doing it and go for it.”
Today, I’m taking a journey for me. It’s the first time in a long while I’m making a personal decision where I don’t feel like I’m escaping something. Although I’m alone I know I have people to share with and I want to share with them.
Still, I have a long history of making plans I fear and never try.
This is one of them.
Road trips, backpacking adventures, articles to write, people to talk to. On one hand I’m self-aware enough to know these plans will teach me something and I create them. In the past I’ve been too scared to just go for them.
Yet recently certain permutations in my life push me to test my limits and as silly as it sounds, face my fears. Last month I took my first backpacking trip and before graduation I finished the longest and most in-depth piece of writing I’ve ever attempted. I feel more comfortable in who I am. For the first time in a while, I feel like I have strength derived from inside me not from what I do. With the support of people like Jackson, who is always helping me face my fears, and Tyler, who know how to ask the right questions at the right times, I’ve learned I’m capable of all the well-laid plans I made for myself. Strength wasn’t just randomly bestowed upon me, but it’s something I’ve been gaining over time with hard work. I realized I’ll never be fully ready for anything. The best I can do is, as Lou Mroz said, “go for it.”
So now I will go.
Bold For the Autumn is a blog I’ve kept for over two years now, mostly devoted to poetry. When I came up with the name I felt like it combined being “bold” something I had to be to make the decisions I was at the time, with my favorite season. As this is a summer of adventures for me it seems fitting to keep that name. I’m making bold decisions until my life settles down for a little bit in the fall.
You can follow my journey here and on Instagram and Twitter.
Dani Walczak 