The Road Less Understood

Why not make your life interesting? Why not let it be an adventure?

You should be you__fully, unapologetically,because no matter what you do, people won’t always understand. They aren’t supposed to. The world will try to fit you into its mold, tell you how to live, how to move, how to belong. But if you spend your days seeking their approval, you will wake up one morning and realize you never truly lived at all.

For the longest time, I was trapped in that illusion,believing that others had it all figured out, that if I just followed their path, I would find my way. I shaped my choices around what seemed acceptable, what looked right. I mirrored my brothers, my friends, the people I admired. Without ever asking myself: Is this what I truly want?

The most frustrating part? Most of it wasn’t even for me. It was for the illusion. The comfort of walking the road that everyone else was traveling, the security of moving with the current instead of questioning where it was taking me.

I was raised in a Baptist home, taught to seek truth in the words of the Bible. And though my understanding of faith has shifted with time, I still hold on to the wisdom that rings true. One verse has stayed with me:

“The road is straight and narrow.”

Not the wide road, the one filled with crowds moving in unison. The path of the outcast, the wanderer, the dreamer that is where truth lies.

We judge the ones who step away, the ones whose hair is wild, whose clothes don’t conform, who choose a van over a mortgage, who refuse to play by the script. But aren’t they simply living in the purest way they know how?

As children, we are allowed to dream without limits. If a child says he wants to go to the moon, no one tells him it’s impossible. Instead, his room is decorated with stars, his bed becomes a spaceship, his world expands to fit the size of his dreams. But somewhere along the way, that freedom is taken from us. The world tells us to be realistic, to grow up, to fall in line.

I left home in my van to unlearn that conditioning to find a truer way of living, free from the limitations of a reality that was never mine to begin with.

“You can’t do that.”
“It’s too hard.”
“Good luck with that.”

These words are chains. Spoken by those who have long abandoned their own dreams, who see impossibility where I see adventure. But the road… unknown, open, wild… has shown me something different. It has shown me who I am.

There is something sacred about arriving in a place where no one knows you. Where people see you not through the lens of who you were, but as you are in that moment… free, untethered, shining in your own light.

I choose to live an interesting life, even if the world calls it strange. I am a dreamer, and I believe life was meant to be a great adventure.

Even if no one else understands, I will continue to live a life that excites me.

—Pentley