Wednesday, August 6, 2014

An Old Draft From My Documents Folder

Life Is Short?
Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘life is too short’? It is usually accompanied with something like ‘life is too short to be anything but happy’ or ‘life is too short to not make the best of it’. Sometimes people will say ‘life is too short to be moping around’ or ‘to be living in the past’. Anyway you get the point. However, if you really stop and think about what these people are saying, you might realize that this phrase is a complete lie. Life is not short, not in the slightest. In fact, life is the longest thing that any of us will ever experience. We live through life until we die and that’s it. That’s as far as we’ll go. So why do people choose to say that life is short? I like to believe that the reason might be because most of us live life following the rules of society. We want to attain what society claims to be right and important and we become so invested in doing so that we do not think of our own goals and what really is important to us. A lot of the times I believe people realize this when it’s a little too late. We open our eyes when we become near to death, to the finish line of life. So we then acknowledge that we wasted all this time trying to figure out how to fit in, how to be that person that society considers acceptable that we forget that the important thing is to be ourselves. To find happiness within ourselves and with what we love is what we all really want but we are just too afraid to let that part of ourselves free and public for the world to see. We might be afraid that people will judge us or put us down. Therefore, we live life the way others wants us to live it. By the time we figure out the truth that at the end of our lives nothing we did will matter, we will feel that life is too short. All that effort in trying to fit in with the norms of society will not even become noticed when we’re gone, so now that we know this we feel like we need to hurry and do all of those things we really wanted to do before our life is over. However, this still doesn't mean that life is short. I think what would be more appropriate is to say that life is unpredictable. Throughout our life we encounter twist and turns and while you may be having the best time of your so far living life, in an instant things can change like the flip of a coin. Lives end, people die and at any giving moment we can end up not seeing another day. So I believe that we must live our lives to the fullest and make the best of it. We must do what makes us happy and not what society thinks will make us happy. We must appreciate the beauty of the world, the good things we encounter and learn from the bad. Learn to see other people’s perspectives and understand that we are all human. Not because life is short but because it is unpredictable.

-          Evelyn Olivares (7-3-2014)

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