Crappy schools would love you, for parading “its about the journey” slogan.

They’d give you free pizza, and a flimsy diploma, and send you on your way.

Similarly every quack between Attila and the Witch Doctor, would charge you for merely sightseeing a meditation.

And in reality, if it was about the journey, then you would give up out of the body aches alone.

This journey non-sense is born from another nonsense, that says it is about reaching the top of the mountain.

You are only going to be up there for a second, so if that was true, why even bother.

See, what great quests are about, is the transformation, a more down to earth word for transformation is growing up.

Sometimes growing way up, until you are able to help, maybe the present, maybe the future, and sometimes the past.

And never in meaningless ways, but in beautiful, ornate and profound ways.

High School is always a good example, because thinking of it in terms of a quest.

Reveals how cut up, disrespectful, and meaningless it has become.

It is not a quest where there is a neat aim, and you build yourself up to it.

Instead, everything has been optimized, towards maximum profit at minimum effort.

At some point someone noticed that memorization, is as good as comprehension on state tests.

And completely sold you out, and you will pretend to learn.

Under a threat of bad GPA and future career, the great discomfort of being yelled at or laughed at.

But real education, is more like learning programming.

Where you start in the beginning, come to the end, and start creating programs to practice.

Every day you learn something extremely valuable, that makes you more as a programmer.

Every day, you grow more powerful, and then practice, will make you a master.

So it is not about the learning journey, it is not about reaching the mountain top and finish learning.

It is about the fact, that you are now, a computer artist, a code wizard.

Very much a creator, where your ideas can now become programs.

But the best example of becoming on a journey, of growing up and becoming a mightier person…

Are the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide Trails, all together know as the Triple Crown of Hiking.

The crossing will take you years, and all those years, you will listen to narrated books written by intellectuals and philosophers.

If you leave the continental divide for last, and hike due north…

When you reach Canada, you will be sad, and relieved, and shaken up.

But in the years that it took you to hike these trails, you will grow up in ways that you didn’t understand before.

You will enter the other side of humanity, where you can observe it, and understand its mistakes.

You will understand that we must each grow all the way up, until we each become a wise and dignified great being.