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Hello friends, I have this beautiful thing that sometimes happens to me when I cross paths with my old angstful places. And it’s happening to me tonight as I write you from Flagstaff, Arizona in the Northern Arizona University Library. Ten years ago to the day, you might have found me here during these same hours, at this same table, memorizing the complex chemical structures of twenty amino acids to redraw and regurgitate on Friday’s Biochemistry test to get the letter “A” printed on my university transcript. I would have been a senior, fresh off spending the summer pedaling a bicycle 4,450 miles across the United States. And I would have been particularly shaking my head at the purposeless hoops I was jumping through, for the professor laughed as he mentioned that we would not even discuss the structure of amino acids in medical school, and I no longer even wanted to go to medical school. One academic year left to finish my degree after a life-changing cross country bicycle ride, “finish strong so you have a fallback” was the idea, and I was grinding my gears to get through. The real problem I was trying to solve, the real question I was angstfully asking, was “where do I go from here?” There was no predefined path I wanted to walk. There was no career I could imagine myself undertaking. Big questions I had no time to explore and no one I knew could answer festered and flamed inside me. Something was so off with the way the of the world. “Is anyone else curious about what the hell is actually going on here?!” I wanted to shout as everyone here-for-but-a-blip-among-eternity seemed unable to see beyond jumping through the next hoop society held before them. Tonight, 3,650 days later, I find myself seated at that same pointless amino acid structure studying table in the NAU library, and to my utter amazement, utterly satisfied. Since graduating, I have somehow gone in the direction I could see no way forward but knew I was supposed to go. This same feeling once struck me five years after finishing that cross country ride, upon returning to the place Reid and I reached the Pacific coast. Ten years later and it’s happening again! I want to dance a grand and wily dance on this table that says, “the cold hard world that had me in its hands still hasn’t gotten me yet!” Tonight, I’m crashing in a cheap downtown Flagstaff motel room after a mountain mansion Airbnb photoshoot at the foot of the San Francisco Peaks, riding high fresh off an incredible WONDER WANDER 2023, planning dance parties with house music DJ’s in my backyard and another December surfing in Ecuador with friends, and exercising the grand privilege of writing to you what sings in me at the table of meaningless memorization from those confused college days. It is so amazing sitting here. I cannot believe it. While my ego may slip a bit of gloating into the written celebration of this moment, I write tonight not as a some public brag, but to offer you the flame of that soul on fire feeling and to stoke the sense of possibility within you. In a society breaking down where pointless memorization and pre-defined paths are still gold standard, we need to hear of others shucking the norm, following intuition, and finding things that make more sense in the unknown. With love & stoke, Ethan P.S. WONDER WANDER 2023 was glorious, cathartic, and perhaps one of the best experiences of my life to date. I bet at least half of those in attendance would not hesitate to say that it redefined “unconditional love” and call it a transformative experience. Wonderwanderer Kevin Ufnal crafted a twenty-minute documentary that gives a better sense of what this “experiential potluck” is all about than anything else before, dig it below!
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