This Family of 8 Fought to Hike 2000 Miles Together w/Ben Crawford of Fight for Together – Episode 26

Imagine hiking 2000 miles, in a row, with everything you need to survive on your back. Now imagine doing it with six children, one of which also required being carried on your back. What a big story! Ben Crawford shares his experience with his family through-hike in this episode with Chris and Debbie.

That’s all very interesting, but what’s even more interesting is what doing this hike taught Ben and his wife Kami about being better humans and parents. Listen along, as they dig into:

• what “Fight for Together” is all about
• rethinking the idea that an adventurous life must be lived before marriage and children
• hiking your own hike
• how the trail provides
• learning to ask for and accept help
• the internet hate machine
• redefining traditional parent and child roles
• what Ben means by safety second
• learning to find alternative ways and paths
• living their lives from the perspective of telling the best story possible
• what lessons they’ve applied from the trail to their lives at home moving forward

They share some laughs along the way, in this deeply honest and vulnerable conversation about what it means to be a parent and a child experiencing life together. You’ll want to hear it all!

Quote from this episode:

• “After all, we thought, when the world sees walking into the woods with your kids as controversial, something’s wrong somewhere in the culture.” – Ben Crawford

We close with:
Everything about this conversation with Ben, his book 2000 Miles Together, and what their family shares of their lives through Fight for Together, struck a resonating chord with me about duality, that there is no duality. There is (almost) always a third way.

As David Carradine says,
“There’s an alternative. There’s always a third way, and it’s not a combination of the other two ways. It’s a different way.”

Ben and Kami were taught this lesson over and over by their children on the trail. Their ideas about their roles and choices were continuously challenged by the thinking of younger minds that hadn’t yet been contained by such rigid boxes.

It’s like that with life. We grow up learning and believing in just one right path to follow, or that if we have a choice, it’s just this or that, just the two. Whether we’re explicitly taught this or we gather the info for ourselves as we go along based on our circumstances, by the time we’re “adults” (I’m using air quotes here), we so often find ourselves trapped within a box that feels so set in a concrete foundation that we don’t know how to get out even if we thought we might want to.

What if there’s another choice? Another path? A third way?

Finding the third way usually means first, doing a little bit of unpacking to discover how and why you may have gotten where you are. Then it means asking a lot of questions about if you even like that box in the first place. Finally, it most likely requires learning to do so many of the topics we discussed in our conversation with Ben, like:

• Question what we’ve been taught to believe
• Question the roles we’ve been given and chosen to play
• Question TV’s idea of the best life
• Redefine our understanding of risk and safety
• Quit listening to the voices of the “they”, as in “What will they think?”
• Become vulnerable enough to be open and honest in this process
• Ask and accept the help that “the trail provides” along the way
• And then finally learn to trust and listen to your own inner voice and intuition

I know! So good, right?

The truth, I think, is that there’s not just a third way. There are infinite ways. And your way is as uniquely unique as you are. It’s yours alone, and it’s for you to determine for yourself.

May you begin to ask yourself more questions today, friends. May you become at least, as interested in what you think and have to share as you are in what the world around you has to say. May this questioning and self-interest cause even just the tiniest of cracks in any box you may find yourself in. And in that opening of the box, may a light enter that illuminates the path that is yours alone. After all, you’ve got just this One Life. What better day to trust you know how to truly Live It! than today?