My Fire

The man and the boy, The Road's main characters always talk about carrying the fire. The fire, after much discussion with my classmates, was decided to be hope. The man knows they are slowly dying and that the warm weather that they are so fervently seeking is not coming to a realization. Their fire is the hope of finding something, anything, that helps their situation. They blindly keep moving, hoping to not get caught, hoping to find food, hoping to be able to live one more day. Their fire also represented the more literal sense of an actual fire- carrying warmth and therefore life with them. A person's fire can be argued to be the most important thing of them- it is what gives them a drive in their life and when a person's fire begins to dangerously flutter that is when someone should start to worry.

My fire is my desire to travel. All my career options and life plans rely on the idea of me studying, working and living abroad. My fire is knowing the unknown, and like the wood or coal that feeds a fire what feeds my fire is the different and the undiscovered (undiscovered by me of course). It might look like a simple idea, or an very 'young adult' thing to want to do but I am already taking steps into keeping my fire out and alive. I will be spending about 10-11 months living with a host family in Malaysia. Then I come back and spend two semesters abroad in Florence, Italy. If I am going to be living in two completely different countries within the next two years of my life, when I am not even 20 yet, where else will I be going? I think that to keep my fire going is to not be afraid, to just go ahead and do things and accept things and try out for things because taking the bold movement is almost always the best idea.

Survival

In the novel 'The Road' the father, or the man as he is often referred too, was confronted by his wife who accused him of refusing of recognizing the truth. The truth that she talked about was that it was a given fact that they would die and the only choice they had was to decide when they were going to die. Wait, be abused, be killed, and then be eaten or to just end it all yourself before things spiral out of control. She then decided to leave her family and just end it herself. This lead to the discussion in our group that asked of us, "What would you do to survive?" Would you be like the mother and decide that fighting and trying wasn't worth the effort because in the end it would result on death? Would you continue to suffer through your health and expose your child to danger and pain and traumatic events like the father? Or would you turn to cannibalism like many of the other survivors did?

After a lot of thought and consideration I would have followed the mother's step. Yes, it is giving up without trying and yes it can be considered the cowards way out but realizing that nothing can be done when the majority of the masses have turned against their humanity does bring a person down. It is cruel to keep on living with a small hope that you will survive when you struggle to find food, shelter and safety. Mistrust of others would plague the thoughts of everyone. The mother, as hard as it is to understand and to accept was right. Death was coming to them all and it would all depend on how long it would take them to realize that death wasn't avoidable.

If I am in a situation that I know my survival chance is 0 and that death is for sure coming, I would not wait for it if I knew that when it came looking for me it would be more painful.