text: Four years we spend hunched over a desk with backlit screens in front of us. Brightening our futures but wasting our youth. For now, mountains will go unclimbed, rivers unconquered and canyons unexplored. When our four years are over our backs will be bent and stiff, our eyes crossed and blurred, our minds void of dreams. What we will gain, I’m still not sure. A better paying job, yes. But that provides us with little. The pay is never enough. Every year we want more than last. We will slit throats, including our own, for more. These jobs allot us two weeks a year to travel the world. A man who starts his career at 25 and ends it at 65 gets only 80 out of his 2080 weeks to travel. 80 weeks to experience seven continents, 195 countries and countless cultures. This is what we waste our youth for. Choose a path of money or passion, because rarely do we get both. At best, some might be able to convince themselves that they love what they do. Deep down, however, the young man with furious aspirations of exploration is vexed. We silence that bitter boy; his dreams are childish and impossible. A waste of blurry eyes and broken backs. Four years of hard work for these things, why drop them atop a mountain’s peak, risk losing them at the bottom of a deep red canyon? Why chance drowning these eyes and this back in a swift and narrow current? We do what we do to provide for the next generation. But provide them with what? The same four years that tortured our minds and livers. Those four years that afforded us with two weeks of travel. Those four years, as we are learning, will cost them much but teach them little. They will sit studying conclusions of generations past, memorizing words of dead men, no time to make their own. Their eyes will wander from blue screen to a framed blue sky, distracted by the idea of freedom just years away. They will think, as we did, that their grand adventure will begin when they leave this place. What they do not realize is that adventure can only last two weeks. You have to play to win but winning has never been in my bones. I’m a loser; a white flag waver for the things that bring me pain. I’m not interested in playing their game anymore. I can’t convince myself I am. I’m leaving, I’m done. Finished. I’m off to make my own game, one that I am the only one stupid enough to play. One where failure is not a possibility. Now the only thing I need to do is convince myself it’s not foolish. It is brave. -C.S.D.