Friday Musings: To Build a Fire

As I started considering ideas for today’s post, I consulted Merriam-Webster for the definition of the word desperation and found two entries listed with a very subtle difference between them. The first is simply the “loss of hope and surrender to despair.” Not much of a surprise there, right? The second one is a bit more interesting: “a state of hopelessness leading to rashness.” Last week, my book club met to discuss In an Instant by Suzanne Redfearn, the story of a family torn apart and reassembled by tragedy, and a study of the lengths we are willing to go to in order to survive. The drive towards self-preservation is considered to be the strongest of the basic human instincts, and very few of us ever have an experience that puts this universally accepted theory to the test. Closely related to this concept of self-survival is our inclination to also protect those who reside in our innermost circle. What wouldn’t we be willing to do in order to keep our loved ones safe, especially in a moment of desperation? At the same time that I was reading In an Instant for my group, my co-worker and fellow idea lover Ben Donia recommended the short story entitled “To Build a Fire” by Jack London as something that might inspire a blog post. And so my wheels began to turn.
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