Smiles on a rainy day are always worth more...

While I always try to stay as calm and positive as possible, because that's the best way to stay healthy and productive, it is increasingly difficult in today's urban existence. My university education was constantly questioning whether or not natural resources and intrinsic pleasure there-from are a privilege of the elite in society or not. The more time I spend in this seemingly urbane city; I seem to be leaning heavily toward the positive answer to that query. Many days, it gets increasingly more difficult to justify running off to the woods, jungle, desert, or coral reef in an effort to pacify my personal urges for adventure and knowledge. I just don't learn from books. I learn from the world around me by finding myself in unplanned corners. Maybe life has an even more unexpected corner that doesn't involve a plane or a foreign nation or anywhere that requires extra vaccinations, but the oddest thing is that scares me ten times more than getting kidnapped in Peru or handling snakes in the desert. How increasingly challenging will it be to try to find new and positive experiences to translate to students while I know all of them are going back to cities that bombard everybody with hourly reminders of our current state of deficiency? I just keep thinking back to my grandparents generation, not that long ago, that learned from growing up with even less resources that we have now; that every little thing has value so long as you take the time and effort to figure it out and that nothing is truly broken until it has been fixed up beyond repair. It boggles my mind how in 60 years we can become such a disposable society. Unless you think that all life is truly disposable, how can you think living is? Everything comes from somewhere. I'd really like to see people learn from this shift in financial affluence and use it as an opportunity for real life education. The most concise definition of "value" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "relative worth, utility, or importance". I can't help but bask in that wealth of subjectivity.