A world of my own
In my world, respect is the proverbial Force holding everyone together. Not love, to ask someone to love their enemy's differences is perhaps too extreme. But respect. To accept that his or her idea while the exact opposite of your own has merit to him or her and that he or she should be allowed to believe it because you can believe in your own.
I was raised to believe that everyone has merit, that everyone can do something. This may sound like everyone has a purpose - no, I cannot say that they do. But everyone has merit. There is not someone out there who does not have something to contribute in some way. It is whether or not they chose to make their contribution as to whether they have a purpose. You must give yourself a purpose, it is not an innate quality like hair color or shoe size.
I was raised in a community which taught the importance of being nice, even to people that you dislike. At the same time, it was alright to dislike people, as long as you were nice to them. No one deserves for you to be mean to them especially because very often the reason that you dislike them is as much your own personality as theirs. Sometimes disliking them was the most respectful thing you could do for someone, an acceptance of irreconsilable differences and not trying to change them.
In my world, people never stop learning and they never get old. Not a coincidence.
I was raised in a world which emphasized productivity, in the use of every hour of every day because it would never come again. If you were not tired at the end of a day, could you really say you accomplished anything? And besides, the shower never means as much if you are just doing it from routine.
In my world, lying is pointless. Secrets, useless. Being open and honest is the only way to ensure a clutter-free life and thus a life lived with as little stress as possible. You will get enough stress from trying to be productive.
I don't understand being regret. If you did it, take responsibility. If it was a mistake, learn from it. If it was curing cancer, be proud. And still learn from it. Nothing we do is useless unless we make it that way. I also don't understand being angry. Something happens, you move on. It may be hard but the less time you spend angry, the more time you can spend putting that emotion towards something more productive. Like being happy.
I was raised in a world where I have free will. I give up some of my free will to others and they do the same to me. It is sharing, also an important lesson in my world.
I do not understand excess. Keep what you need to live and enjoy yourself, use the rest to make someone else's life better. If you are more fortunate, enjoy it! If you aren't, work hard and you will get there.
I was taught to believe in the system. If I don't like the system, I can change it but in order to change it, I need to believe in it.
I was raised to try.
I was raised to be affectionate, to love as often as possible, and to be open with your emotions. Not telling someone you love them only makes it build in you and then the other person doesn't get the joy of being told that they are loved. A sincere hug can go a long way. But don't lie with your emotions, and don't do something just to make someone happy. It doesn't.
I was raised in a world without right answers, only good ones. There are always better answers.
I was raised to seek out challenges and to do things just for the experience. It is the only way of really bettering yourself and seeing how far you can go.
I was taught that apathy is not an option, you have to care. Care or die. It's very binary.
I am beginning to think I was raised in a world of my own.
In America, we have a problem with fat people. With people who drink their emotions. Who are afraid of themselves. We want to be compassionate towards our fellow human being but how can we be compassionate towards another when we cannot have compassion for ourselves? When we do not understand ourselves, how can we understand others? No one is that different from someone else. It is a rare occasion that someone presents me with a problem to which I do not have a parallel in either my own life or the life of a close friend. We all go through the same things if at different times. We cannot expect someone to light the path for us and to tell us how to get to the other side, to get through the difficult issues, but we can expect our fellow human to listen to us. We need to know that we are not alone but in America, it seems that most people are. Most people spend their lives searching for true love because they do not love themselves. They have not taken the years of introspection required to understand oneself and thus they expect to have someone else complete them. In reality, a human is not looking to be completed but complimented.
People were not raised to love without fear of rejection. The world at large does not applaud self-understanding but self-burial, hiding behind drugs and store-bought friends for a sense of understanding which was plucked from the pages of a fashion magazine and not their soul. America wants to be handed understanding, it does not want to seek it out.
Today, I was walking behind an overweight woman carrying a brimming bookbag. She was powerwalking to no where in between puffs of her cigarette. In ther other hand, she had a chilled starbucks beverage/fuel sloshing around. Is that America? What about the pack of fraternity guys who talk loudly of girls and drinking but who share not an original thought amongst them? If the thought were to arise, it would be squished immediately, an outcast! Who needs a new idea when you have alcohol? You cannot blame the fraternity fellow, no, he is merely a product of his environment. We created a system of government impervious to quick change and unfortunately, that stagnation has trickled down into our students. It is okay to be mediocre. It is expected that there will be things that you cannot understand, like Math. And Chemistry.
That is not acceptable. This is one of the few points for which I will not respect an alternate argument. You may not be academically gifted but you can understand math. Chemistry keeps us alive. There is no reason why we are graduating so many Communications majors.
We accept such a low standard of ourselves that it is sickening. We use more resources per capita than any other place on Earth and yet we are resting on the laurels of the people who founded our country instead of making a place in the history books for ourselves. You know what our children will read about in history books? Terrorism. They will not read about the revolutionary individuals of our time but instead about those who attacked the United States. We are not producing thinkers. We are producing people who can do jobs and repeat things. Who can expand into subjects already breached instead of creating their own. We are not cultivating philosophers but breeding automatons.
Further, we are fat. America is obese. Apply that statement to our resource usage, ego, bureaucrasy, and body types. All are correct. We are fat because we do not want to work, we do not feel we have to. If you walk around anywhere else in the world, you will see a handful of overweight people (though even as a tourist, my first thought was that they were American-born) but the majority are not. The vast majority. People are not meant to be fat because being fat is not evolutionarily sound. Fat people did not outrun the lions. The opposite of Fat, however, is not skinny. The opposite is healthy. Humans have curves. Humans have meat. Work hard every day, take care of yourself, eat a lot of good food, and you will have a body of which you can be proud. That is the recipe for a healthy body, not a magic pill.
In America, people do not care, do not try. People do not write social commmentary. People get so wrapped up in who is right and who is wrong, in money, in good and evil, in the afterlife, in grades, in interpersonal problems that they forget that they are part of a brotherhood which is dying. The human race cannot survive without thinking people, without healthy people, without happy people. In my world, those three qualities are what keep me trying. They keep me looking towards tomorrow while making the use of every minute of my day. Those qualities are set on a bedrock of self-understanding and held together by a universal declaration of respect.
Christians, Jesus has returned to you. Muslims and Jews, the savior has come to Earth. In fact, your God has never left - he has remained strong in each and every person who respects his brother and works to make the world a more unified and prosperous place.
I was raised in a world of hope.
I was raised to believe that everyone has merit, that everyone can do something. This may sound like everyone has a purpose - no, I cannot say that they do. But everyone has merit. There is not someone out there who does not have something to contribute in some way. It is whether or not they chose to make their contribution as to whether they have a purpose. You must give yourself a purpose, it is not an innate quality like hair color or shoe size.
I was raised in a community which taught the importance of being nice, even to people that you dislike. At the same time, it was alright to dislike people, as long as you were nice to them. No one deserves for you to be mean to them especially because very often the reason that you dislike them is as much your own personality as theirs. Sometimes disliking them was the most respectful thing you could do for someone, an acceptance of irreconsilable differences and not trying to change them.
In my world, people never stop learning and they never get old. Not a coincidence.
I was raised in a world which emphasized productivity, in the use of every hour of every day because it would never come again. If you were not tired at the end of a day, could you really say you accomplished anything? And besides, the shower never means as much if you are just doing it from routine.
In my world, lying is pointless. Secrets, useless. Being open and honest is the only way to ensure a clutter-free life and thus a life lived with as little stress as possible. You will get enough stress from trying to be productive.
I don't understand being regret. If you did it, take responsibility. If it was a mistake, learn from it. If it was curing cancer, be proud. And still learn from it. Nothing we do is useless unless we make it that way. I also don't understand being angry. Something happens, you move on. It may be hard but the less time you spend angry, the more time you can spend putting that emotion towards something more productive. Like being happy.
I was raised in a world where I have free will. I give up some of my free will to others and they do the same to me. It is sharing, also an important lesson in my world.
I do not understand excess. Keep what you need to live and enjoy yourself, use the rest to make someone else's life better. If you are more fortunate, enjoy it! If you aren't, work hard and you will get there.
I was taught to believe in the system. If I don't like the system, I can change it but in order to change it, I need to believe in it.
I was raised to try.
I was raised to be affectionate, to love as often as possible, and to be open with your emotions. Not telling someone you love them only makes it build in you and then the other person doesn't get the joy of being told that they are loved. A sincere hug can go a long way. But don't lie with your emotions, and don't do something just to make someone happy. It doesn't.
I was raised in a world without right answers, only good ones. There are always better answers.
I was raised to seek out challenges and to do things just for the experience. It is the only way of really bettering yourself and seeing how far you can go.
I was taught that apathy is not an option, you have to care. Care or die. It's very binary.
I am beginning to think I was raised in a world of my own.
In America, we have a problem with fat people. With people who drink their emotions. Who are afraid of themselves. We want to be compassionate towards our fellow human being but how can we be compassionate towards another when we cannot have compassion for ourselves? When we do not understand ourselves, how can we understand others? No one is that different from someone else. It is a rare occasion that someone presents me with a problem to which I do not have a parallel in either my own life or the life of a close friend. We all go through the same things if at different times. We cannot expect someone to light the path for us and to tell us how to get to the other side, to get through the difficult issues, but we can expect our fellow human to listen to us. We need to know that we are not alone but in America, it seems that most people are. Most people spend their lives searching for true love because they do not love themselves. They have not taken the years of introspection required to understand oneself and thus they expect to have someone else complete them. In reality, a human is not looking to be completed but complimented.
People were not raised to love without fear of rejection. The world at large does not applaud self-understanding but self-burial, hiding behind drugs and store-bought friends for a sense of understanding which was plucked from the pages of a fashion magazine and not their soul. America wants to be handed understanding, it does not want to seek it out.
Today, I was walking behind an overweight woman carrying a brimming bookbag. She was powerwalking to no where in between puffs of her cigarette. In ther other hand, she had a chilled starbucks beverage/fuel sloshing around. Is that America? What about the pack of fraternity guys who talk loudly of girls and drinking but who share not an original thought amongst them? If the thought were to arise, it would be squished immediately, an outcast! Who needs a new idea when you have alcohol? You cannot blame the fraternity fellow, no, he is merely a product of his environment. We created a system of government impervious to quick change and unfortunately, that stagnation has trickled down into our students. It is okay to be mediocre. It is expected that there will be things that you cannot understand, like Math. And Chemistry.
That is not acceptable. This is one of the few points for which I will not respect an alternate argument. You may not be academically gifted but you can understand math. Chemistry keeps us alive. There is no reason why we are graduating so many Communications majors.
We accept such a low standard of ourselves that it is sickening. We use more resources per capita than any other place on Earth and yet we are resting on the laurels of the people who founded our country instead of making a place in the history books for ourselves. You know what our children will read about in history books? Terrorism. They will not read about the revolutionary individuals of our time but instead about those who attacked the United States. We are not producing thinkers. We are producing people who can do jobs and repeat things. Who can expand into subjects already breached instead of creating their own. We are not cultivating philosophers but breeding automatons.
Further, we are fat. America is obese. Apply that statement to our resource usage, ego, bureaucrasy, and body types. All are correct. We are fat because we do not want to work, we do not feel we have to. If you walk around anywhere else in the world, you will see a handful of overweight people (though even as a tourist, my first thought was that they were American-born) but the majority are not. The vast majority. People are not meant to be fat because being fat is not evolutionarily sound. Fat people did not outrun the lions. The opposite of Fat, however, is not skinny. The opposite is healthy. Humans have curves. Humans have meat. Work hard every day, take care of yourself, eat a lot of good food, and you will have a body of which you can be proud. That is the recipe for a healthy body, not a magic pill.
In America, people do not care, do not try. People do not write social commmentary. People get so wrapped up in who is right and who is wrong, in money, in good and evil, in the afterlife, in grades, in interpersonal problems that they forget that they are part of a brotherhood which is dying. The human race cannot survive without thinking people, without healthy people, without happy people. In my world, those three qualities are what keep me trying. They keep me looking towards tomorrow while making the use of every minute of my day. Those qualities are set on a bedrock of self-understanding and held together by a universal declaration of respect.
Christians, Jesus has returned to you. Muslims and Jews, the savior has come to Earth. In fact, your God has never left - he has remained strong in each and every person who respects his brother and works to make the world a more unified and prosperous place.
I was raised in a world of hope.