Rachel Winn

23 November 2009

To Live Uniquely

There will come a time in your life when a circumstance or occurrence forces you to take a deeper glance at the root of your existence. More often than not, this could happen during the experience of transitioning from the familiar to the un-known, whether it is moving to a new city, taking a new job, graduating from college, getting married, loosing a loved one, or having a child. Just as often, it could happen when you least expect it; you could be sitting in your favorite coffee shop with a good book, sipping on a latte, when you suddenly realize that your life has gone by in a whirlwind and left you in this particular moment. You look over your life in reverse, pondering the years and days that brought you here, and it starts to seem meaningless! You aren’t where you envisioned yourself being when you started college; as a passionate freshman you saw yourself living life to the fullest and pursuing that which you love, and yet here you are, lost in a mundane life. “What has happened to my dreams?” you ask yourself. From that moment on, you are filled with doubt about your life, about yourself, and about your values.Maybe you have the car, the house, the life that projects acceptable happiness, but for what purpose? You say the right words that your friends and close ones expect to hear; you hide the truth of who you are from them. Have you bought into your societies values? Have you surrendered that which is most beautiful- your personal truth? How do you go about reclaiming that?

Without a doubt, showing your true face to the world is very difficult; as my personal guru Ralph Waldo Emerson stated in his essay titled Self Reliance, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps…the independence of solitude”(263). You have to break down the walls that keep the true self hidden, and doing such is often a journey that takes months, if not years. When you become an adult, it is much easier to conform to society’s values than to live for personal values. In today’s society, materialism is valued more than the heart of a person; you are expected to graduate from high school and jump right into college to earn that piece of paper that enables the securing of a “good” job, which in turn secures you a car, a home, nice things, and a comfortable savings account. You are also expected to date, marry, and have babies with another socially acceptable person, and together project a life of happiness and contentment.

Perhaps, if you are the type of person that enjoys a stable, normal life, buying into such values is a perfectly alright thing to do; however, there are many people that, when they become aware of the flaws of such a system, feel a drive to chase down their true purpose and personal values. For some people, this means a drastic approach to changing their life, as in the case of a young man named Christopher Johnson McCandless.

McCandless, whose adventures were chronicled in a book by journalist Jon Krauker, was born in 1968 to a financially successful, yet dysfunctional family. He discovered throughout his life that society lacked meaning and relied on unimportant values, and he was completely dissatisfied with his findings. Directly upon graduating from college in1990, he took the remaining $24,000 0f the $47,000 given to him by his parents for the last two years of his education and donated it to a charity. He destroyed his I.D and began traveling under the name “Alexander Supertramp”. Over the course of the two years, McCandless traveled throughout the States and Mexico by car, kayak, hopping trains, walking, and hitching rides. In April 1992 he trekked into Alaska to live in the wild, taking with him a 10 pound bag of rice, a Remington semi-automatic riffle with 40 rounds of ammunition, several books (including one on the local plant life in Alaska), and some camping gear. In September 1992, McCandless’ body was found in an abandoned bus in which he had take residence, close to the Denali National Park. His cause of death was pronounced as starvation, but due to the contents of the journal he wrote during his time on the bus, it was later speculated that his death was caused by a type of fungus poisoning, from eating moldy seeds.

Why did McCandless walk away from his money, his family, and the life his college education would have provided him? To do that thing which most avoid: to follow his heart and live with personal meaning. Emerson wrote “My life should be unique: it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine” (263). What he was saying, and McCandless lived out, was that every man should live his life according to the call of his heart, and not by the values set in place by society. Never mind that McCandless’ adventures were a bit reckless and ultimately led to his death; the point is that he did in fact live, with no regard to how others thought he should. He broke all the rules, spoken and silent, and simply went where his feet led, making an impression on the hearts of the few people he befriended along the way.

While such a life choice seems extreme for most, it is a good example of what people can do to re-claim their true selves. A simpler path would be to first examine what is important in a person’s life, and what is holding him/her back from pursuing it. For the woman working in a stifling 9-5 office job, perhaps her self-freedom comes from quitting said job and moving to Europe to study art. For the man working 40+ hours a week, it could come from cutting back his hours to pick up his neglected guitar. For students in college, struggling to choose a major, perhaps taking a variety of classes will help them discover what they truly love to do. Finally, for any person feeling mired down by their routine life: get outside! Too often we spend our lives hiding away from the sun and the trees, which were put on this planet for our enjoyment. Spend time with a child: in their eyes we cannot help but to see the truth. Emerson wrote “Infancy conforms to nobody, all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it” (261). To spend time with a child is to reconnect with the simple truth: we are human, and we are all unique. We cannot pretend around children, yet as adults we build rules to support our pretense. What are we pretending as a society? We pretend that personal values have no place in society, and that the man or woman who chooses not to buy into social values is not as important as those that do.

So when you ask the question “who am I?” should you settle back into your routine after a brief contemplation? No! You should travel the road to discovering your personal values, and when you arrive at them, you should stand up and shout out “This is who I am, and I am not afraid to live it!” Then you should live that truth. You want to climb a tree on your walk home? Climb that tree! You feel like having a squirt gun war with your roommate? Do it! You feel like randomly leaving town for a week and going somewhere you’ve never been? Go explore! If the people around you show contempt for your choices, who cares? The fact is that the person judging you is actually jealous, because they, for all their contempt, are still locked away in their mundane life.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self Reliance. A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers.

Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild/ John Krakuer. p. cm. originally published: New York:Villard, 1996