So I guess, in a sense, this introduction to me is this idea coming full circle.

Here I am three years later living in a 2006 Dodge Sprinter 3500 built out like a small cabin you’d find in the mountains, about to start writing a lot more here.

However, I’ve found a different undercurrent to the choice of living on the road from Googling “Best car to build tiny home in”, to making tons of mistakes during the build, to finding friends on the road.

I’ve been thankful to have found a story of exploration and growth, one which has turned into a pace of hurried and completely relaxed, but never bored.

Life has been an exciting education on how to take seasons and get the most out of them.

Backstory on me

I’ve been surprised by winning an award for outstanding young alumni from my alma mater and being featured on NPR (who described me quite modestly as “not a felon”). I even adopted my furry best friend, Ayla.

I graduated from a small private college in Michigan in 2010 and moved West to Colorado. There, I worked a year at a group home for kids who’d grown up in trauma. I left my job, along with all my possessions except for a few clothes and a backpack, to live intentionally homeless in Denver.

Why? I wanted to learn about a reality different from mine.

Rather than give in to the pressures of adulthood, I wanted to learn to love the world and its people by my ideals.

From there started a path of writing and speaking, which led to having the same conversations thousands of times. It all became stressful and quite honestly, too much for my young self to live up to.

I have a curious heart that doesn’t do well when it’s trying to simply give people answers to the questions they are asking.

I coached lacrosse while creating programs at a homeless shelter and mentoring a few guys through high school. When they graduated, I moved to California, first living with and helping a good friend as he regained his independence after being paralyzed. Then, I took a job as a caretaker at a mountain lodge in Soda Springs, California. I went there to have solitude and write. The experience was profoundly quiet, the lonely weeks easier to romanticize now than they were at the time, and waking up to walk out onto the deck in the cold mornings, watching snowfall through the pines among absolute silence – that was magic in real-time.

Six months in I noticed a lump which turned out to be cancerous and started me on a five-year journey back to health, recovering both from the physical and mental parts of having cancer.

I was lost at first, visiting doctors and dealing with insurance all day while bussing tables and driving for Lyft at night.

I then jumped at the opportunity of a job offered to me to travel for a tech company. I flew around the world putting on huge events, learning from some of the brightest minds in the business world and even played an oddly large role in the rebranding of the split of Hewlett Packard and HPE.

One thing I do best at is to pay attention – during my jet-setting life, I snuck into the backs of the rooms at conferences, pulled out my pen and moleskine, and took notes on whatever the speaker was talking about. It didn’t matter if the speaker was talking about coaching Michael Jordan, consulting presidents, or selling people life insurance. I didn’t care if it was the blind guy who summited Everest or a farmer facing a sourcing problem. I always wrote down what they were trying to tell us. My favorite was from a guy who consulted companies facing change.

He told the audience to fail and fail fast.

The faster you fail, you find out what doesn’t work, the quicker you can get back up and find what does work, what will get you out of this situation.

That stuck with me.

From the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2018 was a long season of learning, a weaving together of passion and pragmatism.

Failing often took longer than I would have liked as I moved from Truckee to San Diego. I lived on the third floor of a very old hotel turned studio apartments with hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings. The Palms Hotel was a rough place to live, but beautiful. The windows faced West, letting light in slowly in the morning but hanging on golden and soft late into the night as trolleys chimed to a stop on the corner of Park and Market Street.

Along with the travel job, I learned to:

• Write copy
• Ghost-write, and
• Manage Twitter accounts

I thought my skill set in photography could be more than a way to tell stories – it could be a career.

I learned you can always get the most out of whatever season you face, but you also have a say and can choose at least some of your seasons.

This whole story involved a ton of ups and downs, of course. I’ve found that everyone wants to get the most out of their season, and a lot of us are looking for a new one.

I’ve learned the best thing is to hold in your left hand and your right both the hard and the good, the change and the steadiness. But hold them loosely enough to really feel them and to let them slip away so you can grab onto something new.

In 2010-11, I experienced the biggest learning curve I think I ever will and grew as a young adult. 2013 brought a move further west, in 2014 north, and in 2015; cancer changed my life.

In 2016, a Dodge Sprinter, who I like to call Shasta, changed my ability to experience what I wanted to. Traveling the world really changed my views.

Living in a van became synonymous with a hashtag, and I started to learn more in-depth how we’ve all got a season going on. Something I love has been helping people get the most out of the season they’re in, helping people choose the climate of that season and how they’ll go through their story of this season.

I’ve decided I’m not going to try to have the answers, but I sure am going to let my curious heart run alongside yours.