In this world everyone knows what the want to do in there life and what they want to before they die but the sad truth is that almost everyone gets stuck with the first job that will keep them alive. The lives we live are not worth living if we just spend it working on something that we are not motivated in and do not believe in just so we can make enough money to afford a house we are never in and a car that never takes us where we want to go. The thing people forget is our life is under our control and no one can choose what we do with it. An office job is safe but doing what you love is worth the hard times that come with it. I  was stuck with the job I  never wanted in a cubicle I never wanted to work in with people I do not connect with. The windowless room I worked in put me further away from the thing i love more than I ever thought possible. That thing was the natural world surrounding us all the time. There are much greater things in this world than sports cars, mansions, and money and they are a lot closer than you think you just have to have the courage. In nature miraculous things occurring at every moment and to witness these things is life changing. I have always wanted to travel the world taking pictures and writing about my adventures by just surviving on the things around me. With an old instant print camera and a journal I just needed a little inspiration and I knew where to find it. I had worked at a paper company for more than 5 years now and every day when I wake up I want to do something different and today on my 24th birthday I am finally going to leave my apartment and most of my belongings behind and make a change.

I grabbed a knife, journal, and my camera and I left. I didn't tell a soul I just vanished and I knew exactly where I was going, I drove to my backyard, The Amazon. I got in the car and crossed the Rio Negro. On the way across the bridge I suddenly got a sick feeling in my stomach and stopped the car on the side of the road. I got out and ran to the side of the bridge and threw up over over the side into the river. I looked back and I could still see Manaus the city I had been stuck in for the last 23 years and I looked forward at the expansive mass of trees ahead and this was the first time I stopped to think about what I was doing but as I looked ahead at the rainforest I thought about my childhood and how long i had wanted to do this and now I was so close. I got back in the car and continued across the Rio Negro and as I got closer I couldn't stop thinking about turning around and heading back to a safe job and home. Although i knew I wouldn't be happy if I went back now but if I continued to the forest I would do what I love and I knew with exploration comes great dangers especially when you are all alone but I was alone back home too. I was getting deep into the forest now and it had been several minutes since i had even seen another car so i pulled over.  I stared at the trees surrounding me for several minutes before I got the courage to open the car door and get out. I picked up the knife and put it in a holster on the belt holding up my jeans and I put the camera over my shoulder and the journal in my back pocket. I then walked down a hill and into the Amazon.

My goal now was to just survive and no longer be surrounded by people who were just like me, stuck. My everyday struggle turned from getting up in the morning to go to work to staying alive and finding food.  This journey would be a hard one but I knew the payout would be much larger. As I walked further into the shrubbery I realized just how hard this would be. The Amazon had surrounded me my whole life but this was the first time I had gone off trail. The ground was wet and there was no dirt but just deep mud, there were too many noises to count and they were coming from everywhere there were birds and monkeys and very large insects but their sounds together created a peaceful harmony. My entire childhood i had played in the forest exploring and teaching myself to survive i had even spent several nights there just to get away from everyone. I learned how dangerous it was and sometimes I wonder how I am still alive. In every direction there is something with a lot of teeth or something poisonous and then there are the things you never see coming like the snakes and spiders. I knew that to stay alive out here I would have to build a shelter and a good one at that. It would have to be above ground and sealed in well. I knew that if I did not build a shelter I would not survive and I needed to establish where I was and lay down markers so I would not get lost, so I got to work. The first thing was to get food and that was easy, the monkeys were constantly knocking fruit down from the trees so I just picked some passion fruit up and ate that for now but I couldn't live off of it. I then used the knife I had brought to cut some of the smaller trees down to start on the shelter. There was a tree nearby that had to be at least 20-30 feet high. I used some of the wood I cut down and put it up in the middle of the tree and it  created a platform now I just need to use some of vines hanging down from the tree to tie it together and all I needed now were some large leafy branches to add in to the top of the tree to create a roof to protect from the rain but I knew that this shelter would only keep out a small number of creatures and not much of the weather but it was all I could make. The night was now coming but I had already made a small shelter and gathered some food so I climbed into the tree and tried to go to sleep.

While I was falling to sleep all I could here were the noises of the running water from the nearby river and the bid calls mixed with the serenity of the small insects and I was at peace. This is all I had wanted my entire life to get away from the small offices,traffic, and loud noises from the city. I could now start creating experiences by myself and writing about them to let the rest of the world know what we had all forgotten. New technology and more money will not make a person happy and in fact some of the richest people in the world lose everything that makes them happy. All the new technology and greed would not do anything but destroy the world and create inequality amongst the world. What we really needed to be focusing on was getting back to our roots and enjoying the world around us without the stress and the tight schedules. We needed to stop worrying about how to pay our bills and instead worry about how we will bring this world back to the way it started, Real.