By: Justin Portugaise, Langskib Alumni

The most important thing that you take home with you from Langskib, the most important learning, is a certain ideal. It is the ideal that you must live your life on your terms, and that you can control who you are through the strength within you. The habits formed there, those of being self-sufficient, not having to depend on others, to take initiative, and to appreciate what you have, will not fundamentally change you as a person. You won’t come home and live your life the way you lived it there; you will, naturally, succumb to laziness and come to depend on the luxuries that surround you, you will begin to take for granted those things that seem most basic to you (such as a roof over your head, having food readily at hand at all times). You will revert, to a degree, back to your old ways, but you will also retain the ideals. You will remember how you can live; how good a person you are and how much you can influence and help those around you. You will remember that there is beauty in everything, be it rain and thunderstorms or sunshine, or being able to stay warm inside your house while cold and damp looms just outside. You will learn to appreciate the simple and small over the grand and complex; such a small thing as a burst of sunlight through clouds, dew on grass in a perfectly still, peaceful morning, the way colours spread like fire across the blue at sunset and the sky becomes the most dazzling canvas you’ve ever known, only to cede the heavens to the stars, who burn a million comforting fires to dot and warm the blackness of infinity. It is this that Langskib teaches you, and its students, blessed in their learnings, begin to realize that the simplest things can make all the difference the world will ever know.