PRACTICE YOUR OWN DESTINY

Local sage Ryan O’Dell is hoping to help people of any age figure out their paths in life

By Nathaniel Kraemer

One day many years past, Ryan O’Dell was using his rowing machine and watching an episode of the Netflix show Vikings. This particular episode featured a blind fortune-teller who could divine one’s future by licking their palm.

“It would be really cool if you had someone that you could just go up to and say, ‘What’s my destiny?’ and they’ll tell you,” he says. “In ancient times, that’s how people were told their destiny. I’m like, what about modern times? How are people finding out what their destiny is?”

O’Dell’s answer is a book titled, appropriately, The Practice of Destiny: 30 Commitments That Turn Intention into Direction. According to its product page on Amazon’s website, the book is a “workbook for people who sense that their life is being shaped in small, almost invisible ways – and who are ready to take responsibility for that shaping.” Structured almost as a workbook, in lessons built around “irreversible questions,” the book is intended to prompt individual growth without imposing dogma – letting people draw their own conclusions freely.

Ryan O'Dell, a language arts teacher at Maplewood Middle School, wrote The Practice of Destiny: 30 Commitments That Turn Intention into Direction to help readers work through how to be true to themselves.

The eleventh entry is titled “What You Repeat Becomes You.” Its irreversible question is “what identity story are you using to excuse a choice you’re afraid to make?” In comparison, the 23rd entry, “Comparison Will Pull You Off Course,” asks the reader who they’re comparing themself to who is “pulling [them] away from [their] own path.” The expectation that readers will be consistently introspective throughout their reading is made clear within the opening paragraph.

For O’Dell, the key to this is honesty. You have to be “ready to put your life and your choices under a microscope. If you’re ready for that, I think the book is going to be fantastic for you.”

At the core of The Practice of Destiny is the idea of being true to oneself. O’Dell phrases this in two questions: “How do you stay to be your authentic self? And when you get lost, because we all get lost along the way, what’s your pathway back?”

The Practice of Destiny contains 30 entries, each with an "irreversible question" and a "commitment ritual." O'Dell encourages readers to participate, complete what they begin and take the next honest step.

These questions originated in his tenure as a language arts teacher at Maplewood Middle School. As Mr. O’Dell, he taught and told stories in an effort to better his students, not just academically, but personally as well. These efforts were often stymied by the stress of peer pressures and emergent anxieties: “You always want your students to become the best version of themselves that they can be. It’s hard sometimes to see your students get influenced by so many different things,” he says.

The youth mental health crisis served as an additional catalyst for his writing process. “I see a lot of our kids coming into school and they’re stressed out over things that they don’t need to be stressed out about, because they can’t change it. And I think that’s what makes us feel helpless.”

O’Dell believes that this turmoil also stems from the stress and alienation of change and transition: “My kids are 24 and 22. I’ve watched them grow up. You know they’re going to stick their toes into different things and try to experience different things, but you always wonder, are they going to maintain who they really are inside?”

He resolved to write a book for those going through these life transitions: for high school sophomores on the precipice of massive change, for 50-year-olds trying their hand at forgotten passions and for everyone in between.

He thought back to teaching and noticed that the things that stuck with his students were most often imparted through personal stories and anecdotes, as opposed to regimented curriculum. This approach was extremely useful to him in writing The Practice of Destiny. In its prose and prompts, there is a clear and conscious effort to genuinely engage the reader on their own terms.

And in a broader sense, this is the point of the book: What can one use to move forward? Or, in his own words: “What are my talents? What do I really want to do? Once I become a little bit happier in that way, I can bring that energy to somebody else, and then you have much more of a way of effecting change than just trying to solve every problem that’s a gazillion miles away.”

O’Dell took his own advice of following his passion by imparting his knowledge to students and founding a band for which he wrote dozens of songs (a book of lyrics to which is currently in development).

Reflecting on this, he sees further opportunity to practice what he preaches. “I’m going to start my 31st year of teaching in September, so I’m getting to that retirement age. We’re always going through transitions, like who we were a couple years ago, whether it’s your kids getting older, yourself getting older, your interests change.… it’s just kind of a book for any stage of life that you’re in.”

The Practice of Destiny: 30 Commitments That Turn Intention into Direction is available for purchase in print at amazon.com.

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While not a Norse seer by any means, Nathaniel Kraemer does have an uncanny knack for intuiting movie twists, often to the displeasure of fellow viewers. He’s a senior at Columbia High School.