Sculpting Reality

True, genuine spontaneity. Not the casual "let's-be-adventurous-and-try-a-new-restaurant" kind of spontaneity, but the kind that gives you a surge of adrenaline lasting for days on end. The kind that happens when you have absolute 0% concern of the consequences of your actions and no acknowledgement of the past or the future - just the present. That very microsliver of time.

Like many people in the dry society we have today, these moments do not happen often enough, but when they do, it is magical. Although the idea of no acknowledgement of the consequences may sound horrendous and fairly irresponsible, it is quite liberating. So liberating, that it has become one of the few things that drive me to continue moving forward.

I was never much of a traveler in the past. The whole "I want to travel the world when I grow up" ideal seemed shallow, distant, and extremely opaque - clear for everyone to see that it was an impossible fantasy. I would scroll through pictures on National Geographic and sift around Condé Nast Traveler, reading about these idealistic locations with a yearning to someday go, witnessing the beauty for myself. But there were always excuses. Traveling is expensive.

I'm too busy to travel.

There's no one to go with - and going alone is dangerous.

The list goes on and on. But after visiting Japan 2 years ago for a high school program (JET-MIP), I fell head-over-heels in love with this formerly ambiguous, distant concept of travel. I came back to the United States in time for my first year of college, and began the intense process of saving money. That meant working whenever my nose wasn't in assignments or class, and limiting myself to spend at most $10 per week. I sacrificed many things that I eventually found to be trivial and arbitrary - things like clothing items I did not need, or fancy food when a cheap slice of pizza could satisfy me just as much.

Unlike a lot of things in life, my efforts paid off, and my savings had increased ten-fold, as shown in the graph below (numbers are blocked, but you see the trend).

The moral of the story is that the possibility of travel is dependent on how determined you are to work for it, and how much of a priority it is to you. This may be the only instance where work ethic is directly correlated with results - the harder you work, the more likely you are able to reach your goal, and more realistic travel becomes.

I do not want to settle with just anything. I am not going to be satisfied with solely studying for exams, getting a good GPA, and sitting at the desk of my new job.

I expect myself to suck up as much information that the universe offers as I can. That little village of the Chaoxian ethnic minority in the middle of China? I'll go - if not now, soon, because in the scheme of our short, meaningless human lives, which resemble a meagerly speck of dust in the scope of the Universe, those moments of spontaneity are worth it.