Beyond Alaskan Boundaries

I've been in Alaska for five days and I keep getting the same questions from back home. Instead of ignoring everyone and not answering anybody I thought I'd just lay it all out here for ya'll.
It's really overwhelming to see how far you can push your own dreams. Elastic bands are fun until they snap and hit you in the face. My life could easily be that rubber band. It seems to keep stretching, and stretching, and stretching to the point where it seems like it may snap but I find the elastic moving beyond rationality.

After I arrived in Anchorage on Friday April 15th I overlooked the mountains and city at sunset with a friend named Ryan who I'd met through Couchsurfing. As I looked down at the city no thoughts ran through my normally very cluttered mind. The only feeling that overcame me on the wind chilled mountainside was the euphoric sense of being in just the exact right place at the exact right moment. All the moments, decisions, mistakes, and movements in my history added up to that moment and fused together to create a real, new, and crisp moment that will never be shared with anyone else, never lived again.

Maybe it's the cold wind, maybe it's not but in that very small time in my life I realized how much further I can stretch my rubber band dreams. It's been a slow process to get the elasticity but now that it's been stretched out it's become apart of the bones. Going further and always pushing that band beyond what seems reasonable is the only thing that feels natural anymore.

I realize that pushing the boundaries is the only way to move beyond them. So, here I am on a fresh new journey with adventure around every corner.

"Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty."

Jon Krakauer