Adventures

" 'O!' said Bilbo, and just at that moment he felt more tired than he had ever remembered feeling before. He was thinking once again of his comfortable chair before the fire in his favorite sitting-room in his hobbit-hole, and the sound of the kettle singing. Not for the last time!"

Yes, I am referencing The Hobbit. Out of all of the literature I have ever read, from Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales, to the great classics, even to the Bible, the Hobbit is what's getting me through this stage in my life. It is the only thing I have ever read that accurately represents adventure.

One day Bilbo is reading and eating by the fire, when everthing is turned upside down. Before he knows it, he's out the door without hat or handkerchief, off on this dazzling adventure. And it is a real adventure, not the average kid lit adventure where the heros are never afraid, and always win the big fights, and have witty lines at the most perilous moments. He is short and chubby, and always hungry, and he nearly does his company in a few times along the way. Every few pages he longs for home, for everything to go back to how it was. The adventure is long and exhausting, and it rains and the food isn't always good. There are even a few times when Bilbo believes that he will not survive, that this adventure will kill him and it will be the last thing he ever knows. In short, this book is not about a happy, comfortable hobbit.

But Bilbo does survive. He makes it home alive, and he brings exotic weapons and lots of money. He looks at his old maps and he knows what hangs off the edges. He has made lifelong friends, some scattered all over the world, others closer to home. And he knows who he is; he knows what he can take, what he can accomplish, and what he can change. He writes a book, because he has lived a life worth writing about. And I grew up on the book. I read it before my double digits, and now as a just-barely adult, I turn to it again.

It's ok that I'm tired and stretched too thin. It's ok that sometimes I wonder if this really is going to work out in the end. That every hour or so, I just want to hang it all up and go back home, where I'm safe and comfortable. But I don't go home. You see, they don't write books about safe and content people. They write books about people that don't even know if they'll make it, but keep going anyways. And even though I don't enjoy it now, I trust that at the end of all of this, I'll look back and be glad that I did it. I believe that I'll look back and shudder at the idea of what could have been; a life safe at home by the fire.