"All change is not growth, all movement is not forward."
―Ellen Glasgow
I often view change as something beautiful. A slow drift of objects through a current, constantly switching paths with such fluidity. A time-lapse video, the lights ebbing and flowing into a multitude of patterns across the retina. A smooth switch from winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, and winter to spring where the pattern begins once again. But this year has taught me that beauty and change do not come hand in hand. Change will not necessarily be right or simple or forward or perfect or easy. It can be rough and confusing and detrimental. Sometime change can set you back both physically and mentally, miles away from your starting place, and eons away from your goal.
Change, my friend; change, my foe. I have had a plethora of wonderful opportunities this year, chances for willful change both for myself and for the community around me. I'm a member of the Youth Engagement Committee of the City of Campbell, a blogger for a site with 5,000 followers, and a member of the Teen Interfaith Council of Santa Clara County. I've experienced Newton's Third Law of Change, and seen that it doesn't always ring quite true. That for every effort I make to change society, to leave a small imprint of my being, results in a greater change for myself than on society and what I set about affecting.
However, unarguably, change has made me grow. Change itself counts among the greatest of my teachers. What I know and what I don't know constantly varies from second to second, minute to minute, and day to day. At the start of this year, I believed I knew exactly what I wanted and where and when I wanted it, but as I have been affected by the world around me - by the countless articles I've written for The Shield and the myriad essays I have written for this class, by the constant flashes of world news from the Boston Marathon Bombings to the Sweatshops of Bangladesh, by the consistent destruction of the environment, by the unfair ideals of society furthered by the government - I have opened my eyes to all the possibilities I shut out before I gave them a chance to speak. This school year has changed me by making me more open to the world around me, giving me opportunities to see where the path of my life might stray, where its can help, where it can leave an imprint.
At first, in all of this uncertainty I began to worry, thinking that the once stable foundation I had built for myself was slowly slipping away and that this change was moving me backward, not forward, yet in the end it's been a most worthwhile self-exploration. I realized I have a solid idea of who I want to be and what I want to do, but I have to choose the way in which I want my vision to manifest. There are so many options that can benefit the world, allow me to be creative, and give me the opportunity to travel the world, but which one to choose?
Among my friends, I am viewed as the decisive one, the one who doesn't take hours to choose which of two desserts to eat or what route take. In other words, I am The Decider. Now, with such an important decision before me that lies in the realm of "Big Decisions" rather than "Trivialities", I don't know what do. There's not really one thing I'm best at; I have an equal affinity for all the fields I am considering. I'm back at square one but, unlike my past self who felt that she needed a perfectly drawn out map of the next 10-20 years of her life, I am willing to float along greeting and bumping into other floating objects that come my way. I've realized that perhaps the best way to change the world is to change myself, to become adaptable, to become open. I have become free.
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy
Wishes
Paddling out to the sea among the stars
wishes colliding
faiths subsiding
patience abiding
I look down at a marble of green and blue
wisps of clouds
tectonic crowds
bellowing sounds
Picture the multitudes of people
healthily walking
loudly talking
frantically rocking
We wait for our destinies
to arrive in our hands
like shells on the sands
of endless lands
But I'm tired of all this
watching
waiting
stopping
Let me leap into the abyss of impossibility
squandering all sorrow
whittling away all despair
floating away, free
