Wise Men Among Us

     Wisdom means many things to different people. It can mean book smarts, street smarts, and everything in between. However wisdom means only one thing. What makes a person wise is more than what may appear.  Good grades and college degrees do not make a person wise. They may imply wisdom, but such a conclusion is the result of a misleading understanding of what wisdom really is.
     Wisdom is not success; it is not an elevated mental ability. Wisdom is something that anyone can have, at almost any age. Wisdom is a reflection of maturity; wise people are psychologically very mature. This is not to say that all wise people are old, or that mature people are always wise. Wisdom is gained through experiences, but those experiences alone give you no wisdom. It's only when you take the time to think critically about those experiences, and exercise your brain in every way possible that you gain any wisdom. Because, wisdom is not experience; wisdom is not intelligence; wisdom is understanding. Wisdom is an understanding of one's self, others, and the world around them. It is a heightened awareness of how the world works in a philosophical way rather than a political or economic manner. Wisdom is using your brain continuously. Wisdom is using your brain to its full potential. Wisdom is more than knowing facts or recalling information. Wisdom is understanding and comprehension of more than facts and previously stated information. Wisdom is gaining a deeper and more powerful type of knowledge through exercising your brain and continuing to create new thoughts and ideas, developing those thoughts, and further progressing ideas and understandings.
      At the risk of sounding self-centered, I like to think I am a fairly wise person. I admit I'm not a philosopher or a playwright. I'm not a mathematician or a physicist. But what gives me some wisdom is the amount of time I spend thinking: thinking about my own life experiences, thinking about events in the world, thinking about anything and everything I encounter. I am still at a young age, so I wouldn't go as far to say that I am a wise person, but I would say that I have done well with the time I've had so far. Compared to most of the other young adults that surround me, I can spot only a few that share my characteristic of analyzing and over-analyzing daily situations and philosophical ideas. There are a handful of wise people in today's society. Present day philosophers and thinkers are few and far between, and this irritates me because everyone has the potential to be wise, and so few people seem to take advantage of such potential. We can all be wise. We are all wise. That's what makes us human. Most of us just need to see our potential.

Apples to Apples

     Jobs vary from the seemingly insignificant tasks to the crucially vital necessities. But how do we determine where on the scale an occupation falls? What makes one job more or less important than another? Where do our respective occupations fall on the number line of job significance? It is difficult to pinpoint where one job would be compared to all of the others. There isn't a single order of importance; there isn't the most and least important with a line of others in the middle. It's comparing apples to oranges. You can't say a doctor is more or less important than a teacher because doing so is paradoxical. The teacher can't be more important because the doctor is saving peoples' lives, the teacher is just providing information. Yet one can argue that without teachers, would there even be any doctors? So which one is it? Is it the person who saves people that would otherwise die today? Or is it the person who teaches the doctors who will save people tomorrow? Is the present more important to preserve the future? Or is planning for the future and ignoring the present a better option? Who's life is more valuable? Mine or my future child's? The decision cannot be made, each option is contradictory. So the importance of jobs is not a scale, it cannot be measured in numbers or figures; it is more of a matter of how and why each job is important. What makes each job important is the only thing we can determine, and in my opinion, there are two categories a job can fall into.
       Jobs can be progressive, innovative, making life easier for humans. These include most jobs: doctors, scientists, engineers, lawyers and politicians, as well as waiters, clerks, garbage men and the often-looked-down-upon task of pumping gas. Whether they are glorious and pay huge salaries, or they are demeaning and pay minimum wage, these are the jobs that make life easier. These are important to society, because they advance society and keep it going at the fastest speed possible.
      There are a few jobs that don't make tasks in life easier, but make life more worth living. These are the arts: music, painting, photography, film, tv, culinary arts, video games, drawings, pictures, color, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings. These are the things that make life so beautiful. They put meaning into life, and join us together as an intelligent, caring community of people. Without the arts, life would be very bitter, dull, and depressing. But without the jobs that make life easier, how could we go on to make the arts? Neither are better or more important than the other, because they are both essential to the future of the human race. The make-life-easy jobs invent, discover, and innovate. They continue to advance the world so that we will make it to tomorrow, and that we will not have to fight to survive. The arts ensure that future is one that's worth living in.

Love is...

Well, love, of course is ____complex­­­____ and ___confusing___, with a little of ___emotion___ mixed in. Love cannot be seen, smelt, heard, or tasted. It can only be felt.

Love is often described as indescribable. That’s not much of a description, but I think it says a lot about the mysteriousness and power of love. Poets and great literary minds alike have tried to describe love forever. Love is something everyone knows, but no one can quite describe into words exactly what it is. It’s something everyone can recognize when they see it, but cannot explain it to a foreign being incapable of such emotions. We can only understand it because it's engraved in our instincts and nature. It's not something that you can explain or define as a single element. It is a spectrum of emotion, far more complex and mysterious than words can describe; yet here I am, assigned to somehow describe what love is, how it works, and where to find it; I must explain the unexplainable and find words for something that there are no words for, like describing colors to a blind man. 

             You don’t find love. Love finds you. It is not a place, it cannot be found. It can only brought out from within each person. It comes out when it decides to, it emerges only when welcome, when the environment is just right to nurture such complex emotions. Love's only habit is being unpredictable. Sometimes it seems so elusive and distant, yet at the strangest of times, it is suddenly so within reach, so tangible and fulfilling. Those who are filled with love everyday can within minutes be completely drained of it. Alternately, someone who lacks love, someone filled with hatred and disgust can be completely changed in an instant, love being the primary force responsible for the turnaround.
             One can't have too much love, be loved too much, or ever want to rid themselves of it. If such situations appear to occur, then the emotional factor is most likely not love, but something different: admiration, jealousy, lust, obsession. Love is so powerful and so single purposed; it's so mysterious and misunderstood. It's impossible to explain, impossible to describe. Attempting to put love into words is, again, harder than explaining to a blind man the difference between yellow and red.

RISK: The Game of World Domination

I don’t take many risks in my life, or at least, I don’t see them as risks. I always want to take a risk over playing it safe, because even if the decision turns out to be foolish, I can always say I learned something out of it. I can always say I grew as a person and that I’m better off for the experience no matter what the circumstances. So I take many risks, but don’t necessarily view them as such. I see it more as taking advantage of every opportunity. It’s not a risk if every outcome is positive; some are just more positive than others. No matter the outcome, it’s always better to have the experience, the knowledge, and the pride that results when you take risks.

I may have written about this a few times before, but this experience in my life was very significant, and it helped me to grow and learn in many ways. Junior year, I took three AP classes. At the time it didn’t seem like much of a risk. As time went on, I realized how risky this decision actually was. The possibility of failure came into my life for the first time, and the consequences of this were, to me, unimaginable. It quickly became a learning experience, teaching me how much work would be involved in life, and how much effort was needed for specific tasks. That whole year was one big risk, one that went from good to bad to good. It started out happy and exciting. A challenging curriculum, exciting new material, and the opportunity to think critically and go further in depth was great. Then the work started to pile up and I learned what a risk I had taken. I refused to give up though, and constantly turned my experiences into learning experiences, eventually making up all the work. That year ended on a better note, receiving three out of five on all three AP exams. I was very proud of myself and the risk I had taken, not because I had ultimately succeeded in the end, but because I had learned so much and had grown so much and I had matured so much because of the experiences I had.

Other than this occasion I can’t recall any real risky things I have done. Maybe it’s because of my view on risks, maybe it’s because I tend to play it safe more than I realize. I’ve never put much thought into how many risks I take and how many situations I take the safe road. It’s something I want to think about more, realize risky situations when they happen, and see what I would do. It’s risky to think so critically about yourself, because you might find something you don’t like. But I think that’s a good thing. If you never find your flaws, you can never hope to fix them. 

The Union's Current State

Citizens of the United States, the country is in the midst of an economic, defensive, environmental, and political setback requiring years of work and dedication to resolve the issues this country faces. There are no one step answers to any of these problems. I’m not going to tell you there is. I’m not going to say that my ideas are going to fix everything right away. Because that’s not possible, and I’m not going to chase after a get-rich-quick method of governing this country.

The issues we face today are difficult ones, and with hard work and effort, in time, we can get back the exceptional America that once was. The economy is not going to rebound completely with a bailout. That might help, but we need to do all we can to better the state of our economy. We need to stop waiting around for someone else to fix it for us, or wait until someone tries to and fails so we can tell everyone that they messed up. I agree with a tax raise on the wealthy. The highest levels of the upper class have more money than they could ever spend, while people in the middle class struggle to keep their homes. That doesn’t imply that we are going to take the money from the rich to help out less successful individuals. I also want to cut spending on many programs, including the ongoing war in the Middle East. We are causing our own problems over there, and the more we involve ourselves, the more we become the enemy. The more we fight, the more we are bring fought. We are our own worst enemy when it comes to foreign affairs because we say we are helping people, but were just pissing other people off. The UN told us to stay out of Iraq, but we didn’t listen. Look where that led us. Yes, we have taken out Osama Bin Laden, but there is always going to be someone to take his place. We can never completely stop Al Qaeda, but we can at least stop making them angry at us.

The environment is continually getting worse with each passing day, and we the people have a responsibility to care for it. The move away from fossil fuels is slow but constant; miles per gallon of the average car continue to rise. Again, the adaptation to alternative energy sources will not be a quick one. It is a process that will take many years to complete. But with continued progress, the environment will get better, the energy crisis will subside, and the American people will be the ones to make it happen through advancement in technology and innovative new ideas.

We can make a better America, let’s do it together.