A year ago I was a fixture in a gently sloped, narrowing room central to the newly-built Purse Hall. The windowless walls and tilted floor funneled the attention of seventy-five sun-deprived students towards a PowerPoint on hormone signaling. Perhaps it was the hypnotic narration of our professor that cued the collective drowsiness that is so often associated with serious learning, although, some of my classmates hypothesized that the fresh paint on the walls was off-gassing and subtly choking our oxygen supply—a conspiracy theory that only gained validity coming from the mouths of these soon-to-be biochemists and Med students. Regardless, we were sufficiently corralled and lulled into the docile state which allowed for the information to be optimally imparted upon us. I glazed over between slide 11—in which the protein Per 1 dephosphorylates a supposedly vital receptor—and slide 15—in which Per 2, after four slides of tantalizing build up, finally binds to said receptor and induces the start of a metabolic day. A wistful thought wafted through the stagnant room: I need to stop huffing dry paint fumes and memorizing signalling pathways; I need to get credit some other way. So I walked across Spain.
According to school, every question in science has a correct answer. And after two years of crunching numbers and circling letters on exams, I began to always expect a right answer. But not just in science, my craving for a precise, provable, and correct answer seeped into my thoughts outside of school. I began looking for the correct answer for how to live a good life. Nobody every graded my answers, I was very disappointed.
Then I walked from Southern France to Finisterre in Spain. I spent forty days walking across farmlands and through cities, in cold rain and hot sun, with people from all over the world. I slept in bunk beds in crowded dorms that got hot from all the bodies. I felt discomfort in my feet and back from the long days of walking, and the discomfort that comes from being stripped of privacy. I began thinking differently; I stopped looking for correct answers to everyday problems and quit clinging to expectations. Thinking is freedom, and freedom is funny.