When many people talk about life, they call it a journey or a path to self-discovery. For me, life is a playground. Learning to do novel things, acclimating to new circumstances, overcoming hardships--in my world, all of these challenges are approached with adrenaline-accompanied fervor, just as conquering the tallest slide in the playground is in the mind of a 5-year-old. Seeing life as a matter of play is positive and constructive, and most importantly, it makes a person open their mind to something they might never have tried and overcome their mental resistance.
When I make a mistake, even a devastating one, I try to imagine myself as a child on a playground: if he or she falls, they might cry, but next day they're back on the swings again. When I compromise a situation, whether that be a grade or relationship, I take a brief moment to reflect and introspect about why and how it happened and come to peace with myself about it, but I don't stay checked out of my normal daily affairs for long. I learn, remember, and move on. If I could encapsulate this mindset in seven words, they would be: Sometimes you win, and sometimes you learn.
Diverging from the idea of handling specific challenges in life, I also have certain all-encompassing ideas about how to treat people. Ultimately, respect is important, but so is approaching each and every individual with acceptance, openness, and love. This idea comes from a sermon I heard in a church a while ago about how we as Christians should love and embrace every human being, be it a cold killer or warm teacher, because all people are children of God and as such deserve a minimum level of respect and love. To be able to approach anybody with an embracing attitude is a skill that requires that we find something that intrigues us about a person or that we like or that we can learn from.
Along with the idea that everyone deserves to be loved and appreciated, I believe that everyone also deserves to be cared for. The fact that while we are complaining about the water taking too long to turn hot, children in some godforsaken country are rummaging through piles of garbage for any marketable item is very troubling. I believe that as a privileged country we should not only devote governmental aid to such disadvantaged places but also engage the better part of the country in helping such places.
For me, debating in classes about how the children whose parent's belong to the top 1% of the income bracket of the world (hint: our village) should be educated is superfluous when just around the corner, CPS has 50-something schools on the closing list. It is true that our education aims to prepare us for the work world and that our village can afford to ask how they can accomplish that goal even better, but my argument here represents my problem with society as a whole: when groups of people or towns or cities go down the gutter, the world doesn't necessarily say "we need to go in and bring everybody back up to our level of prosperity." I would much more willingly live in a world in which humanity functioned as a unit, a platoon, to ensure the survival and prosperity of most, if not all, people.
