BY: ROB HOFFMAN
Back home it’s the weed, movies, senseless drinking and social media scrolling that try to pry away the crippling boredom. But they are all exhaustingly under-stimulating. You can’t get high enough to make the Internet worth it, movies and alcohol don’t last long enough. You can spend your entire life this way, waiting on the edge of your seat for nothing to ever happen.
Out here everything happens at once—the purple dawn, mirrored lake, the smooth transition from the frost-bitten dark into the warm break of day. It all collapses around you at once and the feeling is no longer of running on the heels of excitement but instead trying to keep it from pouring out like a punctured cup of water.
There are plenty of reasons to remain loyal to our world of screens and L-shaped couches, waiting for things to happen though they are things that we already know won’t. We already know that comfort is the killer of satisfaction. The bold are already fortunate and risk is its own reward. But sometimes we hear a voice that tells us the things we want are reserved for lives more interesting, more circumstantially permitting, more chosen-to-be. We don’t have a choice but to hear these things echoing from our nervous, clamouring logic-centres; we cannot divorce self doubt. But we do have the choice of who to listen to. There is another, more pure voice that dwells in our internal lives—the one of our desires and intentions and potential. It will at times seem unrealistic, but you can chose to listen to it anyways. You can bet on yourself with the strong, sweeping confidence that pulls the life around you into orbit and chisels the rust from opportunity.
And though in this magnetic state of being bad things will also find their way to you more quickly, you can choose to vault over them with elegance and an undying determination that keeps you moving forward in spite of everything. The only barrier too large to hurdle will be the one constructed by our own voice of reason and its infectious uncertainty—and only, that is, if we lend it our ear.
Instagram @RobHoffman
**Stories Behind The Stories is a series where our editors give you a glimpse at the micro-journeys behind our biggest stories. Think of it as a confessional, a testament to the unpredictability of the road, the hurdles jumped, people met and the lingering memories of adversity**
