Il était une fois un jeune homme avide d'aventure. Originaire de Florence (Oregon), Jedidiah Jenkins décida de vivre une toute autre vie, riche de découvertes et de rencontres humaines. Le 25 Aout 2013, ils choisit une simple bicyclette pour réaliser son rêve. Considérant que la routine est l'ennemi du temps, l'apprentissage en devient absent et l'expérience vide de sens. Voyager va à l'encontre de ce principe, car chaque journée apporte son lot de découvertes, nous rappellant à tous la richesse de l'enfance. Si tu sors de ta zone de confort, tu réalisera l'abondance et l'importance de ces moments.
A travers son histoire, nous espérons que tu seras autant inspiré que nous l'avons été.
« I just turned 30, and I’ve decided to use this year to radically shape the rest of my life. I am about to leave my job and ride a bicycle for seventeen months, from Oregon to Patagonia. The need to do it hit me about three years ago when I read a quote from John Muir. “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”
Now, I hardly make any money, and I don’t feel like this "trivial world of men" has nothing to teach me. But there was something about drawing close to 30 that felt like I was losing something. The newness of life and career and cities and friends began to find their comfortable patterns, and once you see the pattern, time speeds up. That’s why we hear old people always warning us of how fast life passes. It really doesn’t pass by any faster than those long childhood summers, but we just lose fascination, or I should say we lose wonder. We are no longer astonished by the way the world works. A famous cure for that is travel.
I never thought I’d follow in my parents’ footsteps.
My parents never pressured me to be a writer or a traveller. They never really pressured me to be anything other than myself. My journey is not a reaction to distaste. It is a reaction to an observable trend: human beings amass comfort and minimize risk as they age. I get it. I can see the value in that. But both of those things have a tendency to diminish character. It is a choice to look squarely at the decisions we all feel like we have to make and the priorities we all forget.
I am 30 now, and I don’t want a mortgage. I don’t want property-based responsibility because I think it’ll change my brain chemistry. It makes you focus on protecting what you have rather than fighting for what could be.
I want to pursue wonder, appreciation, and adventure. I want to meet people and learn from them and write their stories and tell others. I want to become a man that pursues virtue and character and color and romance. It feels like the people in our lives who seem to have done that are the ones we love most. If I have a family some day, I want to give them a father full of stories and whimsy and love for being alive. I see too little of that.
You may think I am prolonging adolescence and avoiding responsibility. Well, I can simply say that I am not impressed by grownups or their society. But I will also say that I disagree with you. The choice to pursue a dream, at the destruction of my comfort, with the loss of safety and certainty, all for the purpose of doing something that inspires others to a fuller life of wonder and creativity and quality, to me that is a burden of responsibility worth carrying. To me, that is growing up.
Benjamin Franklin once said, "either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
I like that. I intend to do both. »
