How to be an Explorer of the World Part 4

Here we are on our final excursion of How to be an Explorer of the World. I hope this series has given y’all an idea of who I am and how to get involved in the world. I have had so much fun with this series. For now, I will explain how I have gone WAY outside my comfort zone in efforts to raise awareness and learn about Sanborn Lake. As a class, we have all been interviewing different people who have some relation to Sanborn Lake. This was the first event that took me out of my comfort zone. Asking questions to a person I have never met is somewhat nerve-wracking. There is nothing you can read that will prepare you for how to talk to someone on the phone effectively or how to interact with adults or how to be in an interview setting. It’s not easy. You want to look professional or at least like you have an idea of what you’re doing, even if you don’t. In a few of the chapters we read for class, we learned how to hold an interview before, during, and after. They did a good job of explaining the basics of what goes on, but there’s so much more that happens in real life that you can’t explain in a chapter. Plus, everyone is different. Everyone is going to have different interactions. That’s one of the unique things about oral history projects.

Another aspect of this oral history project was going to the lake and exploring it. As a class, we did explorations from Keri Smith’s How to be an Explorer of the World. It was so much fun to picture myself as a kid at nature camp or a youtuber or a person documenting her “days in the wild.” It was a step out of my comfort zone once again, but it was a step to make me see more than what meets the eye. Back at the beginning of the semester, we had to read an article by John Burroughs, The Art of Seeing Things, I think it still applies to this unit in the semester. Everyone observes different things. As I was out at the lake, I noticed the baby frogs and tadpoles swimming in the water. My friend noticed streams and water running through the walkways. Nothing wrong with that, but there is something to be noted about how each eye holds to a different lens.

The last thing that has pushed my comfort zone is making a website with the knowledge I have obtained through interviews and being at the lake. I find it hard to spill another persons’ information. Even though I have the right to, and I have been asked to do it, I seem to still be able to talk myself into thinking that it is not my place to say anything. It is not my story to tell. In fact, it is exactly my place. I have been asked to do this for the people of Sanborn Lake. This is something personal that I have had to work on and grow through. This is my final step into being an explorer of the world. At this point, I think I have been successful in exploring the world, the community around me, and myself.