I am Ben.
“You serve as an example to others, whether its a good or a bad one.”
The Coolest Thing I Can Tell People I Did:
When I was 19 I took a solo road trip across the country for 3 months.
I backpacked in Philmont for 2 weeks. (Rocky Mountains)
I canoed out of Northern Tier for 2 weeks. (Boundary Waters / Quetico)
I served on Staff at the Summit Jamboree for 2 and a half weeks. (New River Gorge area)
Then I went to Florida Sea base for a week and a half. (Dry Tortugas National park)
I came home and more or less disappeared for a few years without ever giving the adventure takeaway that I wanted to tell. Life happened: I fell into a portage that lasted a while. When you’re in a portage, there’s one clear way out; it’s just not an easy way.
The stories are easy to experience but hard to tell. For example you go backpacking probably expecting to see a mountain top, but what you spend more time doing is thinking about discipline. About how climbing a mountain is a long process that is so simple (it’s just left foot right foot) but the act of repetition and scale make the gradient challenge ever persistent. It’s those deeper lessons that I am showcasing. What I like to do is say a story will be about one thing, but be figuratively talking about another thing. I know it doesn’t quite work the same when I spell it out, but eh, it’s a style…
The purpose of this site is to share the life lessons I have already learned through experience. They’re probably not super helpful. They most assuredly are long and expository. I’ve had some of these writings in a form for many years. Of all the writings of vary polish, these are what I hope are the most usable ones.
About
I identify as a successful failure. If I imagine the story of my life, I hope I would be at the part where things start to turn around rapidly; the start of a montage that gets fast forwarded through. However, for the time being, it’s simply the present… and it’s slow.
I don’t have plans to even openly share this hobby site, so in case you accidentally found it:
I talk about camping things, and probably life things.
more About… (Definitely Skip This)
The Boy Scout Troop
I joined the Boy Scouts of America in 2010. I was 12, which is a statistical outlier. Most Boy Scouts start as Cub Scouts during elementary school. I joined by a wonderful accident. I write about my early Scouting history in the writing “The Method to My Madness” which I wrote when I was 16 years old. The context is I arrived home from a Troop meeting feeling this deep feeling of depression about aging out and ending what I thought at the time were the greatest years of my life. I was on top of the world. I was the guy to know in the Troop. I had been a Senior Patrol Leader. I had gone through several rotations of the troop campouts. But the end was in sight. What more is there? I had done everything, or so I thought.
This is a story about perspective. How you think you know what you know, but you really have no idea.
The Troop story is covered in Method to My Madness, which may exist somewhere here eventually.
High School
This context will help describe the type of kid I was. I was smart, but was ‘very much over school.’ School was never a big deal to me. Once I was in Scouting, I put all my eggs in the Scouting basket. Which of course, they say, and did say, not to do. When they did, I would smile. I knew better. (I did not.)
I was always on the High Honor Roll until the later years in High School when my ego gave me the senioritis feel. I ended with a 3.7GPA, so it wasn’t detrimental. I never did homework (at home). Home was for gaming, sleeping, and unwinding. The concept of homework was so wrong to me. I saw the bigger picture (so I tell myself):
An adult will go to work 8 hours a day, then go home for 8 hours of free time, and sleep for 8 hours. That is the ideal dream of adult success. So why, would “homework” ever be a thing? Adults surely don’t need to take work home every day without getting paid. This was my mentality. If I was ‘off the clock’, it was personal time for me. In my memory, I cannot remember ever doing any homework at home except for the big projects and book reports.
I liked math the most, but of course since math is famous for daily homework, it would have been a much lower grade despite it being a fun subject for me. Halfway through High School I started my love of writing. . It started as a coping mechanism for stress. I didn’t want to forget things, I didn’t want to say stupid things out loud, but I wanted them remembered; so I wrote.
Work
Ever since I was at the age to get a job, I’ve had a job. At 14 I had a job in sports I didn’t like (I don’t like sports), but that’s not the point. I worked. When I was 15 I started at a fast food restaurant, with a lot of minor-labor-law-restrictions, of course. I would continue that job, loyally, until it wore me down enough at around 19.
I write about this work story with a lesson of the caution that should go into offering more to a company than they genuinely care about you for. I assume it’s not on this site yet, though. Summary is I had this fast food job from 15 until 19, then got an office job that I much prefer.
The office job was a breath of fresh air because I was hating the constant around the clock, unpredictable schedule that came with restaurant or retail work. I absolutely LOVED the Monday - Friday 9-5 feel of a proper adult job. It improved my life standard a lot, I got to a better, safer place. I figure it contributed to helping me get off a life portage.
Since the world shut down in 2020 that job has been working from home, which is a privilege, but also a little dangerous. I believe myself to have strong morals but there is a temptation that your home space holds over you, and there is something phycological about a home-life / work-life separation.
College
It was absolutely never even a conceptual thought that I would not go to college and get a degree. It was just so obvious that I would go that I never even thought about it, truthfully. It was something I was raised knowing I would do, its what my parents had done, what my brothers had done - it was no question. However, I was getting really scared by Junior / Senior year of High School because, after all, it was obviously going to happen, but… time was ticking and… what was I going for? I still didn’t know.
I write about my several college attempts in “The College Try(s)”. It’s shorter and not too impactful, for summaries sake here know:
I tried to go to community colleges at least 5 times. I was academically dismissed twice from my local county community college. Then I moved after my Summer Adventure to a different county, and I tried two semesters there, too. By the end, I actually probably had passed at least two classes, but I was too anxious to even look.
The constant trend is that I would be unwilling to ‘drop’ classes when I knew I would eventually fail them, because if I were to do so it would be admitting to myself that it was a fail. So instead, I just sat back and watched the fail come in, and then the dismissal or probation follow. At least that way, there was always a chance I would get back to what I call an “on cycle” (out of the portage) and get things going.
Thus, leads to a point of embarrassment and contention. To people that knew me in School, in Scouts, or other circles, I was someone surely on a road for success. No one needed to expend energy my way to focus on what I was up to, I probably had things on track.
The reality is, I failed miserably. Well, at the time of writing, years after all this, I would go back to school and (presently) am still on that portage, but I’m much more lakeward bound now. I have a new focus that was staring me in the face for years:
I want to be a teacher.
When I was an older scout teaching skills to younger scouts, I had parents tell me I had a lot of patience, and I was really good with kids, and that I should be a teacher. When you are in adolescence you don’t want to listen to these things, you want to be a disruptor, or maybe that’s just me? The way I self-analyze, I was too arrogant to in my mind ‘settle’ for any one given career interest, which is eluded to earlier - I thought I had too many options, so I ended up making no options. I say this honestly to hopefully make the failure a part of an eventual success.
Beyond-Troop-Level Scouting
This deserves to live somewhere else, so I expect it’s probably eventually going to have it’s own thing. For people outside of Scouting this would be confusing (lets be real here though, who even is this audience? Pretty sure this is just for me). I’ve done MOST of my Scouting outside of the Troop level. Everything you know about Scouting, if you just vaguely know about “Boy Scouts”, you know about a Troop, probably. It’s more likely that you actually are just thinking about Cub Scouts, and in which case you are almost entirely off, but this is besides the point. This next section will only make sense to a small sect and I’m not going to work too hard to try to give context.
Vaguely, it’s the OA story - at the Council, Section, and National level.