Ryan Benz Quotes

“I was blindly heading down one path, unaware, sleepwalking, stepping but not feeling the ground, looking but not really seeing.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I had spent the last several months trying to forge a better relationship with myself, my goals, my expectations, what I valued, and where I spent my time and energy. I hoped to use the trail as a reconditioning tool, to stop looking so far ahead and find true pleasure in the present moment. I had steeped myself in knowledge of the great masters, sayings like “To travel well is better than to arrive,” and, “The journey is the reward." I was shedding my life of destinations with only a bare tolerance for the journeys between them.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“What had I actually left an entire life behind for? I couldn’t put those words together, not here in these first steps on the trail. I’ve come here to figure out what I came here for, I settled on and kept stepping.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“But what happens when we follow that template only to realize everything we were told we should want isn’t actually what we do want?”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I remember just standing there alone in our empty home. All I could think was how big it was, how all my time had gone into being able to afford it but rarely ever enjoy it.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I was simply moving at a pace that never allowed for self-reflection, to check in and ask those critical questions: “Who am I? What do I think about all this going on around me? What should I do about it?”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I had been driving ninety down the highway of my life, white-knuckled, eyes trained on the little white stripes… never seeing all the beautiful trees and towns I was passing.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“It wasn't actually being on the trail that made me truly free. I don't want anyone to read this and believe that they have to hike the Appalachian Trail in order to find themselves. It also wasn't ending my marriage or leaving my career, though I do believe those things were a necessary part of my journey of change and rediscovery. The true key was the mindset I learned to adopt, one amplified by the trail. It was the ability to appreciate the current moment, the willingness to be in it, and taking it in at the speed the moment required.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I had needed to break up the life I was living in order to see all the pieces of me and begin to understand them again. Only then could I begin to put them back together in a better form.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“Standing three hundred miles from Springer Mountain after hiking for three weeks, this work-in-progress version of me knew there was immense value in enduring hardship, pushing myself toward what I believed were my limits, and seeing myself burst through the other side of them.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“Money was only a tool, a very useful one, but nothing more than that—a thing to bring value, not a value in itself.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“If the thing you are doing is giving you meaning and purpose, time spent doing it is never wasted.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“Growing up near the Appalachian Trail in New Jersey, I never saw it as anything of any great importance, just the woods I would disappear into for a day. Looking back on those memories, I realized just how far from that trail I had come and how far I had to walk to get back.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“This experience was both adding and subtracting to Ryan. The experience of life itself, the moments of silence and laughter, the time spent thinking and wondering and not thinking at all were all added. Subtracted from me were the previously held idea of who I was and the belief that my worth was found in a title, a salary, a position of responsibility, or anything that could be purchased by having those things. The scabs that covered the wounds of life were falling away, and under them, I found healthy skin, Ryan’s skin, parts of myself I hadn’t seen so clearly since trekking into the woods of the Appalachian Mountains of my childhood.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“Before, I might have poured over the minutes of a meeting, brushed up on a new product I was selling, gleaned what I could of the people at the company I was going to sell it to—anything and everything to advance my career, make more money, build “more life.” Never would I have spent time intentionally doing less and thinking more, thinking about who I was intrinsically, or who I was becoming.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“Stepping out of your comfort zone is far greater than the comfort itself.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I hadn’t come to that world of adulthood with the right intentions—purpose over prosperity, value over quantity, meaning over means. I had wanted to gain the world, not realizing I already had it, lived in it, was a part of it, and it was a part of me. And all I needed was to contribute in a way I loved, in a way I wanted.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I realized that was how problems worked. When you quit worrying about them, they ceased being problems.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“It’s only when we slow down that we notice all the beauty surrounding us.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I thought about the seven straight days of rain and ultimately walking through the last of it jacketless and how so often we tend to protect ourselves from unharmful things.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“Perhaps it was just the offspring of being completely alone, moving at a pace and in a place that allowed for reflection. Maybe that’s how all the best insights are born.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I began to appreciate the fact that this highest point in Virginia didn’t have a view, a lesson about expectations and maybe a metaphor about some efforts being only about the effort itself and not some tangible reward at the end.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“The clouds parted, and the trees were situated in such a way that the beams of light coming through the cracks felt like you could reach out and scoop a piece of the golden light into your hands.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I wondered what I might have learned about myself had I given myself the freedom, when I was fresh out of college, the permission to wander and contemplate what I wanted from my life.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“I imagined the experience being similar to going your whole life believing you had perfect vision, then suddenly learning a new color, one that brought meaning to every other hue. How would I describe that? How would I convince former “me” of the importance? The more I thought about it, the less confident I was that I could, but the more convinced I was that I should try—not to the former me, of course, but to everyone.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“Wasn’t that the whole point of the trail? To embrace growth as a journey, not some finished destination? To be okay just wandering, not sure where that wandering might take you?”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.

“The first was a touch unsettling, but before long it was more therapeutic than scary, listening to the soft thunder rolling through the hills and valleys around you. There was a connectedness to nature that the storm brought, almost like a deep voice singing to you as you lay in your tent.”
― Ryan Benz, Wander: A Memoir of Letting go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life.