”If you project into the future onto your deathbed you can realize that you would give just about anything to return to this moment.”

- 15 Ways to Surf Time

Howdy y’all,

This weekend my brother and I dove into the North Star, an exercise my wise and highly competent friend Oliver offered at WONDER WANDER 2021.

The North Star is an exercise in envisioning the ideal for each of the pillars of your life. For example, my current pillars are: spirituality, creativity, wellness, adventure, giving, wealth, sanctuary, partner, family, and friends (you can choose your own). Basically, you ponder each pillar, write your envisioned ideal, and keep it all in a computer doc entitled “North Star” to be referenced and rewritten as needed, to help orient as you navigate life.

While I’ve led a life of “finding more than seeking” and observe that the creative force of the universe has a richer imagination than I as a singular human being ever could, the periodic check-in with my “North Star” is remarkably fruitful. Through rewriting three pillars this weekend (creativity, adventure, and sanctuary), I had a handful of insights, noticed my concept of “where I am in the arc of a life” move up a notch, and unlocked an energy and enthusiasm for a few particular creative potentials lying dormant within me.

What shook me most, though, was a sentence I wrote back in 2020 in an article entitled 15 Ways to Surf Time that Oliver placed atop his North Star instructions:

“If you project into the future onto your deathbed you can realize that you would give just about anything to return to this moment.”

The past few days, I’ve kept returning to this deathbed scenario… If my future self, a few breaths from my last, had the opportunity to return to right now, to this precise moment.. what would I feel… how would I act?

I bet there’d be more wonder. More reverence for the incredulous circumstances conspiring to create this moment that we somehow make into mundane.

I bet there’d be more love. I’d be running straight for all the people I’d lost along the way, howling with affection, tears, and snot, overwhelmed by the opportunity to connect once more after losing them forever.

I bet there’d be less fear. With a deeper understanding that everything we get together must also fall apart, I’d probably fret less and float a whole lot more.

I’ve found myself yearning to better align my perspective, values, and actions with this figurative back-from-the-edge-of-life Ethan. And as funny as this may sound, it’s taken writing right up to here tonight to realize that I already am this Ethan!

Sixteen years and half my lifetime ago, I was on my deathbed and returned to life as this person. The foundational first posts on this blog, like The Living Theory and In Memory of an Astronaut, just ring with the near-death realization, what a gift life is, and strive not to squander it. I think I’ve been haunted by that sentence all weekend because it touched something so fundamentally felt in me, that in the sixteen years since, has been somewhat patterned over by the experiences and pressures of life within a culture that lacks reverence for it.

Anywho, I hope you’ll forgive the diary entry direction of this letter as I rediscover myself, but I’m going to press send and make an offering of the spark within it.

With love & stoke,

Ethan

Things I Co-Created This Month:

WONDER WANDER 2024 Video Montage

Once a year, I host ‘WONDER WANDER,’ a multi-day gathering of creatives, adventurers, and all other sorts of fascinated-fascinating humans out in nature. We share, we laugh, we hike, we stargaze, we philosophize, we dive deep, and relish in this crazy experience of being with one another.

WONDER WANDER 2024, was the 5th go at throwing this grand "experiential potluck," built around a dozen or so humans all offering an experience for the group. And it was surreal and loving and interesting and learned and rad.

I cut the video from clips this year’s wonderwanderers spontaneously filmed with an old vintage digital camera I brought along — and love the feeling conveyed through this beautiful sliver of moments we captured.

Watch the video