CARVE YOUR OWN PATH

I loved Mondays as a kid. My brothers and I lined up in the “Walkers” line to get dismissed five whole minutes early from school. We’d walk a mile (without an adult) to our local library, finish our homework, explore the shelves, and play two square outside. Between the card catalog, microfiche, and shelves packed with magazines, the Choose Your Own Adventure books had a magnetic pull on me. I was fascinated to have so many choices with each door opening to a drastically different ending.

The books that first taught me the ending wasn't fixed.

Fast forward a few years to high school. In creative writing class (one of the most remarkable classes ever), Mr. Howard asked us to animate a favorite poem in front of the class. I remember enthusiastically and awkwardly acting out Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, wildly waving my arms as "two roads diverged in a yellow wood." At the time it was simply another assignment. Looking back, it feels more like a theme that would quietly follow me through life.

I grew up outside Washington, D.C., in a family that valued humor, learning, and play. Some of my favorite childhood memories were hearing stories about my parents' travel adventures and mishaps before they settled down. Those stories taught me there was a big world beyond my own backyard. More importantly, they taught me that life wasn't something that simply happened to you. It was something you actively participated in creating.

Like many east coast college graduates, I entered the business world and began building a career in accounting and finance. From the outside, I was dutifully checking all the boxes: stable job, strong pay check, signing bonuses with stellar benefits, and a future that seemed predictable and secure. Yet the moments that brought me the most energy had very little to do with the work itself.

Instead, I found myself encouraging coworkers to train for their first triathlon, bike commuting, and escaping for lunchtime runs with coworkers whenever possible. The work that paid my bills and the activities that made me feel fully alive were becoming increasingly disconnected. At first I ignored that feeling. Then I rationalized it. Eventually, it became impossible to overlook.

Around that same time, I met Jane on a bike trip on the White Rim Trail in Utah. Jane had left her engineering job back east to become a bike guide! That fact blew my young mind. Until then, I had unconsciously assumed there was a fairly standard formula for adulthood. Jane had created a life that looked nothing like the paved version of success I had followed. Until that moment, I hadn't fully appreciated how many different ways there were to build a meaningful life.

Sometimes a single person expands your definition of what's possible | White Rim Trail, circa 1997

Several years later, while considering whether to leave my corporate career to attend graduate school in pursuit of a new path, I shared my plans with a coworker who listened carefully and then said, "I could never do that." She wasn't being critical or dismissive. She was simply describing what she believed to be true about her own circumstances.

What surprised me was my visceral reaction. I didn't feel judgment. I felt fear rush through me. Not fear of leaving my job or taking on student loans, but fear that I might someday begin telling myself the same story. Fear that I would stop seeing possibilities. Fear that I would convince myself I was stuck.

I didn't feel judgment. I felt fear rush through me.

That conversation became an inflection point. I traded my heels and business suits for sneakers, exited the corporate grind, attended graduate school, and landed my first teaching job in Colorado after graduation. I was thirty years young, single, and knew no one in the state of Colorado. Moving out west by myself was liberating, slightly terrifying, and occasionally overwhelming. I knew that if I stayed exactly where I was, I might spend the rest of my life wondering, "What if?"

Most of the meaningful decisions in my life happened before I felt ready. They weren't fueled by confidence as much as curiosity, possibility, and the growing realization that staying where I was had become harder than taking the next step. For years, I kept a quote by Anaïs Nin hanging in my sight: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." Those words captured exactly how I felt in those years. The leap wasn't comfortable, but remaining where I was was more unsettling. I didn't know where the path would lead, but I was willing to find out.

I didn't know where the path would lead, but I was willing to find out.

Carving my own path has been winding, unpredictable, and filled with unexpected twists, turns, zigs and zags. Some of the best opportunities, friendships, and experiences arrived through doors I never imagined opening. Looking back, I'm grateful life hasn’t followed a straight line. It's the zigs and zags that make our stories worth telling.

Thirty years young. First Colorado winter!

Today, I live in western Colorado, coaching and leading adventures through some of the same landscapes that first inspired me all those years ago. Every time I watch someone step outside their comfort zone or surprise themselves with what they're capable of, I'm reminded why these experiences matter deeply.

Some of the best views come after taking the path you weren't sure about.

Those childhood adventure books taught me something I've carried ever since: our stories aren't written all at once.

They're written one choice at a time.

One conversation.

One decision.

One leap.

One turn in the trail.

The ending isn't fixed.

So I'll leave you with a question:

What story are you living right now, and is it one you consciously chose?

And if not, what might happen if you turned the page and started writing a different ending?