An Inspirational Passage From Laird Hamilton

"The point is: Your path is yours alone. And if it's the path less traveled, that's absolutely fine. The world doesn't need more conformists. The world needs more people who create and question and search. If you don't fit in, celebrate that, and then get ready to stand your ground. Our society has some rigid roles for people, and when you decide that you don't want to play the same game as everyone else, you might not get much support for your decision. Don't let that discourage you. The best way to find your path is to start with a dream and then refuse to listen to anyone else's opinions about what you 'can' and 'can't' do in the pursuit of that dream."


This is a paragraph from Laird Hamilton's book Force of Nature. Laird is not a vegan or even a vegetarian but is an incredibly inspirational athlete and person. Despite that, I find this paragraph to so powerfully represent those who have boldly moved on to veganism. Although this piece by Laird holds a lot of meaning to me outside of my diet, it really can be pieced apart to represent all that we believe in and are going through.

Your path is yours alone. Go to school. Be a good boy. Get a good job. Eat your meat and potatoes. Adults don't play games. Retire at 65 and prepare to die. Screw that! We're not in training for the real game. This is it! This is the real game. There are no reset buttons. You don't get to do it again so, do it right now! We don't need anyone's approval to do what we want to do in our lives.

The world doesn't need more conformists. The world needs more people who create and question and search. The only people who want us to be conformists are the government, Nike, Mcdonalds and the rest of the corporate world so profiting off us is as easy as possible. Sandra Winn, a great writer from Pensacola, Florida, has a great post on how the term Un-American is being thrown around as soon as someone fails to conform, questions or searches for better answers. Imagine a world where people are truly free to do what they want instead of spending time trading hours for money at an unproductive job then spending the rest of their time mindlessly watching a very minute portion of our population on a flat lifeless screen re-create what the ideal world should be. All our worldly problems would be non-existent and we'd be off to space to explore the infinite worlds that lay beyond us.

Get ready to stand your ground. Becoming vegan, or doing anything outside of the norm, will always be met with friction. This friction comes from people who are ashamed of their own fear to follow their dreams. This is your chance to be a positive influence and lead by example. You don't need to argue your situation. You don't need to fight back. Don't be self-righteous. Just stand your ground and stay the course. Be positive and others will see your success and happiness. They may not come around to support you but they will stand down.

You might not get much support for your decision. Don't let that discourage you. You are living your life and no one else's. The only support you need is from inside. If you have a significant other that doesn't support you, you may need to do some serious thinking about the compatibility between you and him/her.

Refuse to listen to anyone else's opinion. Opinions are formed from something as simple as a drunken conversation with a stranger at a bar 5 years ago in a city 500 miles from home. Read reviews from tripadvisor.com if you want to see how many widely varying opinions people can have about the same resort/hotel/attraction. My parents were skeptical about me running right from the beginning because they had one friend who used to be a runner and injured his knees. The reason why the friend had a hard time walking in his 70's was because of running and only because of running, according to them. He was a runner in the days before Bill Bowerman and proper footwear. He had arthritis that certainly wasn't caused by running. But, that is how the opinion was formed and solidified - 1 person's experience. You have a better chance of dying from hypothermia in Cuba than you do during a running race yet when someone does (probably someone who hasn't trained 1 single kilometer in their lifetime before the run) it makes headline news and the running nay-sayers come out in droves.

This, of course as we all know, applies to veganism in an extreme measure. I tried going without meat once (for 2 days), I just couldn't survive on lettuce. Heard that one before? People don't know the facts, try something and when it doesn't perform miracles immediately they write it off as bullshit. I don't want to waste away, be pale, lose my hair, lose my teeth, be weak... Take a look at Mac Danzig, Carl Lewis, Woody Harrelson, Alec Baldwin, Georges Laraque, etc. Do they look sickly to you? Please try and tell Mac Danzig he looks sickly and weak!

Finding Your Happy Place

There’s a dream that I have often. I’m running on a trail in the woods. Meandering along the left side of the trail like an old companion is a fast running brook. On the other side of the trail is a steep climb but it never affects the trail. The trail runs relatively flat and smooth. The temperature is perfect. It is summer and the days are long. I’m running at dusk, but dusk lasts forever as does the trail. Never do I pass over a road or through civilization. I’m breathing hard but am not out of breath. I’m as swift as the wind, but I’m at an easy stride. It’s just an endless run through the woods, beside the brook.

This is one of my happy places. Many times in the movies, you hear the psychiatrist telling his/her patient to find his/her happy place. Many times, I was in a stressful situation and looked for my happy place but was unable to find it. I started to think about this more often and not just during a stressful situation. I started to realize that I have several re-occurring dreams that have been with me for a long, long time. Some have been with me since I was a kid. In these dreams I found not just my happy place but my happy places.

There’s also the spring fed pond back in the woods that is crystal clear and teeming with fish. This dream stems from my love for fishing when I was young. Although I no longer wish to catch or eat fish, I love to see them as they are one of the earth’s most diverse and beautiful creatures.

In fact, most of my happy places involve trails, crystal clear water and Mother Nature’s isolation. The only exception that I can think of is being in New York City in the summer time. But there is a similarity. When I visit Manhattan, even though I am surrounded by millions of people, I feel safer than being in any other city that I’ve ever visited. I also feel a strange and comforting isolation. I believe it’s in knowing that not one of those millions of people even knows I’m there. It’s as though I’m invisible. However, there is still the comforting feeling that I would immediately become visible if in distress and would be helped by many of the incredibly compassionate people of that great city.

Okay, so New York isn’t actually one of my re-occurring dreams but it is one of my happy places. We are always trying to find the meaning in re-occurring dreams. Sure, some aren’t very pleasant for some people but if you’re like me, most of them are. I now believe the meaning of giving us these dreams over and over is to imprint in our minds a happy place to easily get away to when the mental going get’s a little too tough to handle.

Keep an eye out for these locations while you sleep. It might not be a full dream. It might only be a smidge of an image. Remember them and how happy they make you feel inside. Recall them the next time you’re in the dentist’s chair, or taking off in an airplane or making a speech at your best friend’s wedding. Take a little vacation at your happy place then get on with what you have to do with a refreshed mind.

Living In The Present

It wasn't exactly at the time I turned 40, but it was the benchmark age that was constantly going through my head. Shortly before the big 4-0, I found that I was falling into the habit of trying to calculate time that had passed by in life and trying to compare that to how much time I thought I had left. This is probably the most futile thing a person can do! I found that some things that happened 20 and even 30 to 35 years ago stood out so vivid as if they'd happened yesterday (a blink of an eye, so to speak) and some things that happened 2, 5 or 10 years ago were a complete blur that seemed in my mind to have occurred in a different lifetime.

I made some pretty crazy revelations like: twice the time had passed between my birth and now than had passed between the end of World War I and my birth; In only 6 or 7 years I would be paying for my children's university education; People I'd gone to school with and grown up with and hadn't seen in years were starting to die off not from car and motorcycle accidents but from terminal diseases and heart attacks, things associated with old age.

It got to me for a while. I was going to die someday and that day was not getting any further away. After I realized that this idea was driving me to the brink of insanity, I decided I needed to do something about it. I centered my attention on my health since it was the one thing that could prolong my demise the longest. I, of course, became vegan and I pushed my physical fitness to levels only comparable to those glorious years in high school (in some areas even beyond that). Most importantly, I convinced myself that living in the past and the future was a waste of time. I began to live in the present.

I've stolen 10 quotes about living in the present. They fall in no particular order, but all inspire me and I hope they will inspire you. In recent years, a little internet invention called Facebook has skewed our perceptions of the past by bringing it all back in a big rush right in our faces. It gives us little triggers that bring back the glory days and make us long for it all to be real again. I still love to use Facebook but I realize that you can't go back and just maybe those glory days were no less glorious than the day you're currently experiencing.

• If you are still talking about what you did yesterday, you haven't done much today. - author unknown
• We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time. - Art Buchwald
• When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. - Alexander Graham Bell
• If you have one eye on yesterday, and one eye on tomorrow, you're going to be cockeyed today. - author unknown
• Nothing is worth more than this day. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present. - Babatunde Olatunji
• I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. - Alan Watts
• We are always getting ready to live but never living. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow. - Fulton Oursler
• One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. - Dale Carnegie

The highlighted quotes are my favourites of the favourites...