"I'm dying," I think to myself as sweat drips into my eyes. My lungs feel like they're collapsing, the sun is merciless on my face, and my legs are burning with the impact of the ground beneath my feet, daring me to cease, to stop this nonsense otherwise known as "running." I was a freshly plucked freshman at my first cross country practice, and before joining the team I had never run more than a minute straight in my life....

At the moment, my life revolves around the prospect of getting into college while the world around me is facing an unimaginable number of atrocities and injustices, problems far beyond which college I'm going to attend for the next four years. To clarify, I'm not saying that I'm not taking this step in my life seriously, I actually mean the exact opposite. In my realization of the complexity of the world and my limited perspective of it, it is also...