About a week ago, I was talking to a good friend about journaling. This friend shared their thoughts with me about how strange it might be to look back, say in ten years from now, at the words they are writing today. What will their future self think of their current self? Oh, what doth the future hold?
Well, while visiting my parents this week, I came across something interesting. With my mom having asked me to sort through some old boxes containing some of my belongings (might I note, she's been asking me to do this for years), I came across an old journal of mine from my senior year in high school.
I kept this journal as one of my assignments in my senior English class. Each week throughout the trimester, my class was given a topic and asked to write a page about it. I remember how much I enjoyed this aspect of the class.
Today, nearly eight years later, it is, indeed, a rather strange sensation to look back upon these entries and read the things I once wrote. On some of the entries, I find myself thinking, "What the heck was I thinking? That didn't even make sense!" and/or "How elementary was that?!" and/or "Man, was my grammar baaaad!"
So, I have decided to share two of these entries with you today, in the future which I probably could never have fathomed some eight years ago:
Title: "Life is a Journey"
Topic to respond to: Chaucer says we are all pilgrims. Nike says life is a journey. Using these two ideas, tell me where this journey called life is taking you. Entry:Life is taking me through many journeys. I find it an honor that I am already seventeen years of age and still alive; I have had a lot of time to die. Different things matter to different people and, to me, I feel that life is no big deal. We all die sooner or later. I feel that when I die that it will not matter. I will not be remembered unless I invent something, murder somebody, or have sex with The President of the United States -- and I know none of these events will ever occur in my life.
I am bored in this life. Although, I feel that when God ends this life for me I will go on to another one, and it is not heaven or hell. So far, my journey through life is leading me to pursue a career as an Optometrist. I feel that the eye is the greatest and most magnificent organ of the body. I learn a lot about people from their eyes. There is no telling what will happen to me in the rest of my disinteresting journey through life.
Title: "Does it matter?"
Topic to respond to: Some of you expressed a concern that I always choose the topic. Well, today you may choose. I hope you find this more worthwhile.Entry: (Note: The very last paragraph may be somewhat confusing. I had re-written the entry eight years ago when it was due, in order to clarify something to my teacher. I did not go back and re-write it today.)Beautiful. What exactly is "beautiful," anyway? Why do we feel the need for beauty? Why do some people think skinny is better than fat? Why do some people think tall is better than short?
One thing in life that absolutely disgusts me is idealism. Who says beauty is idealistic? Where did we get the idea that things have to be be beautiful in order to be perfect, anyway? I get so embarrassed and humiliated when I am with a friend and he or she makes a rude comment about a person's weight or looks. Being with a friend like I just mentioned makes me feel so dirty because, to me, everybody short and tall, overweight or underweight, fine hair or coarse hair, is beautiful.
My idea of beauty is everything that has a purpose in life, such as the eyelashes used to shield the dirt from our lovely eyelashes, or bucked teeth used in a wonderful smile. A true definition of "ugly" or "beautiful" does not exist. A person can be the most beautiful person in the world and still have people in the world who think they are ugly.
I have to admit that I went back and re-wrote this entry because I wanted to add one tiny, yet very important, idea to this entry. The idea is that, as it says in William Shakespeare's poem, "Fear No More The Heat Of The Sun," no matter whether a person is smart or dumb, rich or poor, beautiful or supposedly ugly, we will all eventually die and we will all eventually turn into dust. My advice to people is to try to look at everyone and everything as being beautiful in some way, as best as is possible, because we humans are all in this life together.
