Sunday at 2, Thursday at 8

Mark and Thando met as teenagers at the United World College of the Adriatic, on a cliffside campus in Italy; a kid from Eswatini (Thando) and an island boy from the Cayman Islands, born and raised in Jamaica (Mark), thrown into the same tiny college town and somehow becoming close friends. Neither of them chose this, not really. They graduated from UWC in 2021, and both landed in the US: Thando in Virginia, Mark in North Carolina. I, on the other hand, touched US soil a little earlier. Through the same UWC cohort, I arrived at Montezuma, New Mexico, in August 2018 and graduated in the midst of the pandemic. After a gap year, I met Thando at the University of Richmond. And after my college graduation, I met Mark.

Growing up, we all develop goals for our lives, aspirations rooted in our backgrounds, and so they carry an emotional weight for us. These goals transpire because the unfiltered creativity and innocent freedom of a child is too strong not to inspire one. But it comes in simpler installments. For instance, printing your first "Hello World!" And then the joy of learning about the for-loop, because now you dream of printing the same "Hello World!" a hundred times.

As we grow older, these dreams get tested against the vicissitudes of the world and, depending on the struggle, our dreams morph into something a little more pragmatic for the realities of life. Why are you printing "Hello World!" a hundred times? What problem is it solving? Who is your target audience?

To endure these questions is not a small feat. But that is what Mark, Thando, and I do every Sunday at 2 pm for two hours. And then we repeat it on Thursday at 8 pm. 8 pm on Thursday because it's a weekday and our dream has not been cultivated enough for us to give up our day jobs yet. This has been going on for almost a year now. Within those scheduled four hours, and many more left unaccounted, we have formed dreams we truly believed in. But we have also watched some of those dreams dissipate as our understanding of the logistics of the world collides with our aspirations. There is nothing pleasant about these failures, if failures they were. They are moments of stony desolation. The bigger the will to grasp it, the more melancholic its nonachievement.

At first glance, there is little out of the ordinary in this setup. Three international friends whose paths crossed by chance, aiming to foster a dream that is far from finished. But what is rarer is the perseverance we have demonstrated against our failures. The constant endurance against a system that perhaps isn't entirely in your favor, a struggle against our own incompetence and inexperience, a fight that stems from our own imposterism. Yet we believe we come out of it better.

The first time I saw Mark, he and Thando were in a spirited debate over some architecture decision, their dream reduced to a few lines of code on the laptop between them. That dream has a name now, GradAisle, though the name matters less than what it took to keep saying it out loud in the weeks when nothing worked.

It is difficult to conclusively prove whether success after perseverance is an absolute certainty. Yet we keep the appointment. Sunday at 2, Thursday at 8. Not because we are certain of the outcome, but because waking up each morning is not something we earned; it is the quiet gift that grants us one more swing we did not ask for and cannot take credit for. If GradAisle fails, it will not be because we didn't try hard enough. If it succeeds, it will not be because trying guaranteed it. It will simply mean that on enough Sundays and enough Thursdays, three tired kids from three different corners of the world kept showing up to the same loop, and somewhere in there, luck agreed to run one more time.

@mark_plowright_dec454aca1 @thando_tsela