“To be heroic is to be courageous enough to die for something; to be inspirational is to be crazy enough to live a little” – Criss Jami

Hey y’all, I’m back and it’s been a MINUTE. I’m flying to London today to start yet another nomadic journey. I will be backpacking all over the globe for the next five months or so. When I pulled up my app to start writing this on the plane, I found a draft of a post I never finished or published, and I think this post was the reason I’ve avoided you all for so long. I’m going to post an excerpt from the beginning, and only the beginning, because I don’t think I can finish it, even now.

Excerpt from July 2018:

“I find myself always writing these while I’m on a plane. Flying gives me space and time to think I guess. Recently I was confronted with the possibility of real grief. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced real grief before. My grandfather died when I was 17, and though it was utterly devastating, I don’t know that I fully appreciated or understood it back then. My stepdad, who has been more or less my father for the last 21 years had a heart attack last week. My stepdad, my enthusiastic, annoyingly happy stepdad, had a heart attack last week that should have ended his life.”

There is a lot more that I wanted to say that week, but I didn’t get much further than what you just read. To ease your minds, he completely recovered. We just celebrated a year since it happened, his “new birthday” as he likes to call it. On the anniversary of this earth shattering event, he hiked to the summit of Pike’s Peak in Colorado. He’s a rockstar.

You know, he’s taught me so much throughout my life, but nothing as important as how abruptly a perfectly healthy human can meet imminent peril. Life is so dang short. Here’s what I know: We’ve got to take the risks, we’ve got to say the words, we’ve got to share love and absorb every ounce of joy from this world that we can. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. I will be trying to live this each and every minute of the next five months and I hope it shows as the weeks ahead come and go.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Mads.