STOLL/Proposal for What is the nature of freedom ©2006. smkstoll@yahoo.com
2
"I didn't know you were engaged. I thought you didn't even like her," I said, my voice
edged with betrayal.
"I've been thinking about that a lot. I made a list. She's almost everything I wanted." He
takes a deep breath. "There's something else.... I'm moving to Omaha."
"Nebraska! Isn't that the corn something-or-other state? I thought we were trying to get out
of the Midwest."
"I'm leaving this weekend."
"Who's going to pay rent?"
"You'll have to find somebody else. I'm sorry." He walked into the bedroom, shut the door
and called his wife, leaving me to my bedroom, which consisted of a couch with a pattern like
a bad Hawaiian shirt.
I couldn't conceptualize my fear yet, but deep down, I realized that I had been working
overtime to accumulate all the cultural symbols of success -- things I didn't even want, but
feared I needed in order to be loved -- and it had all backfired. As I sank deeper into the must
of my hand-me-down couch, I realized that I only had one life, one chance, that I didn't want
to be the guy lying on his deathbed full of regrets and what-ifs, I wondered, "If I had the
freedom to do anything, what would I do?"
My "impossible" answer was to ride my bicycle around the world.
The idea grew, out of control, like a virus with its own mind, and the following year I
tested myself by riding across the USA from border to border and coast to coast. The year after
my 6200-mile warm-up, my friend Dennis, whose bicycle path I crossed in the Grand Tetons,
asked, "Scott, Were you serious when you said you wanted to bicycle around the world?"
"Of course, I was serious," I replied with bravado.
"Well, I've decided -- I'm going to do it, and I invite you to join me." Dennis has always
been good at following his heart without analyzing the logistics and taking the path less
traveled without regrets; whereas, I'm inclined to get stuck on the first stanza of Frost's poem:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
