when all the responsibilities of the year are over, success or failure won and assimilated into a person, the world gets soft. drifting, comfortably homeless, debts paid, remaining duties requiring no effort - nothing to do but sit and read. sitting, static. eating fruit, smoking and staring at clouds. and that's summer, the kind of summer that children have, before fifteen comes and it's time to work, forcing too young adults to play more seriously at rebellion in the off-hours. a soft world breeds soft people, soft minds that muse and muse with no reason to seek conclusion or, worse, action.

and so myths are crafted, about changing the world with nanotechnology and about the subtle unacknowledged mechanics of card's battle school and about exploding intolerance with eloquence and reason. and they remain as myths, never scrawled down in a notebook (attention flutters around, drawn to any number of simultaneous pointless prospects), certainly never breeching imagination to form themselves into paths to be followed, plans to be made.

learned behavior, social conditioning - parents of complacency. little babies told time and time again to shush and play outside, to touch nothing, left only the experiments in their little minds, these have inaction written into their destinies. never to mobilize humanity, though the orders they would have them carry out might be the seed of utopia. never able to test beyond their internal simulations, never to find the wrong assumptions and correct them. closeted up with musings that, eventually, grow softer, less challenging, as the diffculties of a real world stifle their ability to pretend to control it. they retreat and retreat again, to places where ideas are safe, cannot be marked naive, more reticent in seeking challenge, finally shunning it.

it's an easier thing to eat grapes in the half sushine that filters through undisturbed blinds, to get lost in the great achievments of others and pretend that the day will come when similar accolades will be won by one who at present only dreams. deludes himself or herself into thinking that resources are being stockpiled, ideas and experience accumulated, that more time must pass before the actual doing, actual carrying out, can even be considered. in truth, the ideas assumed to be safe in some mental storage closet have decayed and are useless, whatever was inspiring in them long since lost. the consequences of a soft, introverted life, of too much dreaming.