Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time
Andrew Forsthoefel
1 ratings • 1 reviews
Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time
Andrew Forsthoefel
1 ratings • 1 reviews
Life is fast, and I've found it's easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I'm slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us. At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn't know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn't know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself. Ultimately, it's the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself on the most human level.
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The coolest thing about this book/story is that Andrew is only a year or so older than I am, and he was on this journey during my senior year (and after) of college. I actually remember reading a news article about what he was doing at the time!
On the one hand, this account is super philosophical and even at times for me came off as pretentious. That being said, I think this guy is like the male version of me, because so many of his musings on life, God, and how people interact with each other sound exactly like conversations I've had at length with pretty much anyone willing to sit still long enough, especially with my best friend Abby. I understand that this trek across America was the author's journey and he was trying to really puzzle out major life questions, and really probably about half of this book is him thinking a lot.
His account of all the great people he met and all the help that he received is very heartening and optimistic, but I can't remember any instances in the book where he was really in any danger or where he was threatened or had any confrontations. I guess that was good, and I wouldn't have wanted him to put anything in the book that was untrue, but somehow this lack of problems just resulted in a lack of tension throughout the book.
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