I now walk into the wild.

"I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life." 
-Leo Tolstoy


I just finished Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. It's about the fascinating life of Chris McCandless, who at 24 left behind the typical life of privilege and trekked into the Alaskan wilderness. His body was found four months later, where he appears to have starved to death.
There is overwhelming negative feedback directed towards Chris, the most common being that he was no more than an arrogant and overconfident idiot obsessed with "finding himself" through the solitude of nature. And while it's true that he might have been ill-prepared due to his confidence, I cannot help but see his life as an incredible inspiration.

"here's to the crazy ones. the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. they're not fond of the rules and have no respect for the status quo. you can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. about the only thing you can't do is ignore them. because they change things, they push the human race forward. and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." 
— Jack Kerouac

Books have always had great potential to move me. I seem to drink in the words that I read, adopting them and feeling as proud of them as if I had written them myself.

"The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. Do not fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it." 
-Chris McCandless

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life; to put to rout all that was not life, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." -Henry David Thoreau


I want to live in these words. I want to paint them on the walls which are the first thing I see as I wake and the last thing I see before I fall into sleep.
I can only hope to live my life with the same kind of passion.