Homework
You look over at the clock below the TV, and realize it’s past midnight. “How much more homework do I have?” you think to yourself impatiently. “I must have been doing this for at least 4 hours!” Your eyelids feel as if they have weights hanging down from them, and it’s a struggle to keep them open. You’ve tried everything to keep yourself awake, from splashing water on your face to blasting music into your ears. Nothing seems to be working. It feels as if your brain is being tenderized with a mallet. Your eyes are flickering now, and they shut. You snap them back open, forcing yourself to stay awake and focused. You must stay awake. You must finish your homework. You must keep your eyes open. You must get this done. But then, you take just a small mental break, and feel your eyes shut, and they don’t open back up. Later, you wake up to noise that seems louder than a gunshot. Disoriented, you drag your head up off the couch and glance over at the clock and realize its 3 in the morning. “What more can I do?” you think as you hike back to your room where you will flop yourself down on your bed, and even that seems like a marathon.
"To Build a Fire" response
There are many elders in the world. Some of them wise, some of them not. Over time, you will hear advice you think is good, and you will take into consideration, and others that you will disregard. You will hear a lot of advice from the elder, the wise, and you will think nothing of it. But what if I told you, your life depended on something some wise man had told you, and you had disregarded it? Would you take the advice then?
To start off, in the short story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, there is a man who is traveling for work. This happens to take place in Yukon, which is an excruciatingly cold place to be. Even though it is 75 below, and an old timer from Sulpher Creek warned him not to go, he continued to travel through the brutal conditions. Equipped with the proper gear, he made it pretty far, until a fatal mistake. He crashed through the ice, and knew he needed to get dry. The weather proved to be too much though, and he ended up falling into the snow and laying there, waiting for death to come grasp his soul.
While you may think the man did everything he could, but did he? What if he would have listened to the old man from Sulpher Creek? Stayed and waited for a better time to travel? One of the main lessons in the book is to listen to advice. I can relate to this because when I’m doing something wrong, instead of doing something again and again the same way, someone will tell me what I’m doing wrong, and it’s an easy fix. Many stories have gone like this whether it be sports, school, or life. Most of us make us through this, unlike this man. Some of it however, can be fixed with common sense too. It’s common sense to not go outside to walk many miles when it’s 75 below. Stupidity and ignorance took this man’s life.
So was it the man’s fault that he died? I say yes. He was ignorant, and didn’t take any advice, thinking he would prove the old timer wrong. It ended up costing him his life. So what if I told you, that some advice someone once gave you, would save your life? Would you look at everything more carefully?
