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Mis amigos, Tonight I want to tell you about my relationship with possibility. Probably because I feel the fire of possibility flickering in me once again. At twenty-one, something happen to me that gifted me an incredible and totally unexpected sense of possibility. I had this crazy idea to pedal a bicycle across the United States. And I thought I might do it to raise money for the children’s hospital that saved my life. And I did. And it went so much better than I ever thought it possibly could. My brother and I planned to try and raise $10,000. But at the last moment before launching the fundraiser, I backspaced “$10,000” from our fundraising page and typed “$42,330” ($10 per mile for 4,233 miles). While I thought raising $42,330 was absolutely unachievable, I also thought people might take my brother and I more seriously if we wrote a big number down. They did. Long story short, we raised almost one hundred thousand dollars for the hospital, more than double that number I thought was totally impossible. We were on almost every local news channel, had a whole page in the paper, I even won a scholarship for the same amount of money that we had originally planned to attempt to raise thanks to our ride. I couldn’t believe it. This experience radically undermined my previously limiting self-belief. And I went on to spend the bulk of my twenties having rad adventures with a limitless sense of possibility. I was a deckhand on a cruise ship for three months pondering a life captaining ships. A digital nomad in Mexico working an edgy startup idea that was going to change how students chose colleges. I opened a bar next to Yellowstone National Park with zero bartending experience. I wandered the world and read books with the intention of writing my own. I thought I’d learn to fly planes for a living and signed up for flight school. But the pandemic pinned me a third of the way through and I found myself twenty-nine years old with negative twenty-thousand dollars living with my parents with no prospects of flying myself out of the situation. Shit. My parent’s place had always been warm and welcoming, a true safe haven. But in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events fashion, an unbelievable mix of legal threats, vicious dogs, and far left ideologies consumed the lives of my all-under-one-roof family at the simultaneous height of the pandemic. The possibility, wonder, and stoke for being alive that generally arose from everyday experience of reality was quite patterned over with frustration, confusion, and fear of inevitably succumbing to a life of numbness and mundanity. Since moving out of my parent’s place in June of 2021, I’ve been slowly, bit by bit, letting go of those negative experiences and trying to “reprogram” my body and mind. When I find myself falling into patterns of frustrated and ruminating thoughts — it is abundantly clear now that they don’t actually help — I try to breathe and return to what is here and happening before me. Every Sunday I gaze at a vision board behind my sliding closet door of wisdom, symbols, and heroes and follow it up with a walk full of gratitude practices, visualizations, and repeated mantras. I could say more, but you get the point: I have been actively and repeatedly walking better paths than the ones the pandemic programmed into my habitual body-mind for a couple of years now. It’s working. These past few months, awash in the magic of the Festival of Yes, WONDER WANDER 2023, and a snowballing mass of wonderful serendipities (like flying a drone for the sunset DJ set below and booking flights to spend December surfing in Ecuador with a beautiful bunch of people), I am again touching that limitless state where it feels like there is no ceiling — or walls for that matter — to what is possible. I want to be done with believing about what is or isn’t possible. Better to leave possibility to reality I think, and relish the adventure of finding out. With love and stoke, Ethan P.S. I have distributed over 300 In This Together Bumper Stickers thus far and with a sweet little bank of photos coming back, decided to start an Instagram to collect and share them all. If you’re into it, follow @inthistogetherbumpersticker as this adventure in possibility and perspective expansion unfolds.
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