Living and Leading Through Coexistence
It seems like an impossible task to look back
on my life, as well as to the future, and put down in words what my life
essentially amounts to. While musing over what my answer would be to this
question, the sound of Dr. Bump’s voice protesting “What would you die for?”
kept resonating in my mind. The answer to that question for me is surprisingly
simple: my family and friends. Everything
I have learned that has been of any true value in my life has come from my close
family and friends. I have always viewed the value of a person’s life in terms
of how many close personal relationships they have. Like everyone else, I
desire to be a self-sufficient being who continually works on my strengths in
order to make a positive contribution to society. However, being raised in a
world where many are self-involved and are always in pursuit of social
glorification, I have always been turned off by the idea of living for the
limelight. “If any of these roles are
who we think we are--social worker, therapist, mother--what’s left when they
fall away? ‘Where’s the rest of me?’”[1] The
rest of me consists of the relationships I have made and will continue to form
over the course of my life because they are what truly inspire me.
When I was in third grade I had to do a presentation on “What I want to be when I grow up.” Like most children, I wanted to have more than just one occupation. I told the class that I wanted to be a psychologist and a dolphin trainer. Oddly enough, you must have a bachelor’s degree in psychology in order to be a dolphin trainer, so my passions were bizarrely linked together. Even in my youth, I reveled in the idea of talking with people and getting to know them sufficiently so that I was able to understand their problems. My family and friends would say that I have always had a passion for talking. I cannot count the number of demerits or detentions I received over the course of my school career for talking when I was not supposed to. I can trace my tendency to speak out during class back to the first grade because that was the year that I gained a lot of weight. I was the designated “fat girl” in all of my classes, so I always felt the need to impress my peers by being funny and witty, since I was in no way going to impress them with my looks. At a young age I realized “the problem of always having to be ‘somebody’. So we decide to let it all go, become the model of humility, and aspire to the ideal of selflessness.”[2] I learned humility at a very young age because I was always teased about my weight by the boys in my elementary school classes. However, it was because of my humiliation that I learned two extremely important truths: I learned how terrible a person can make another feel by ridiculing them in front of their peers, and the importance of being kind to others simply because you want them to feel good about themselves. I derived so much pleasure from making others happy, that it was a reward in itself to know that I had made someone laugh or given them some solace by listening to their problems.
As I have grown older, I have come to realize
the importance of simply listening to others, especially during difficult times.
There have been several junctions in my life, especially in high school and
college, where I feel like I am barely surviving in the rat race of life.
During these times I pray a simple prayer that is quite similar to Martin
Luther’s:“Hier Stehe ich. Ich Kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen. [Here I
stand. I cannot do otherwise, God help me. Amen.]”[3]
Everyone goes through these moments of despair when they cannot help themselves.
During these times it simply takes one person to listen and to genuinely be
concerned to pull you from your hopelessness. I believe that “deep companionship, born of
honesty, can often arise when we meet another in Not Knowing. ‘What’s the
matter?’ ‘I don’t really know.’ ‘Well, I don’t know either, but here I am.’”[4] This quote illustrates the type of open and
honest mindset one should have when approaching someone else’s problem. During
my adolescence, my parents and sisters always showed their concern and support
for me by constantly asking me how I was feeling. Even though they usually
could not directly relate to my problems, they always were there to discuss my
dilemmas and show compassion for my pain. Merely receiving hugs from my family
members helped me through some of my toughest times as an adolescent. It is
during these times of despair when you truly understand the unity of the human
race. I love the idea that we are all the same, united by our genetic makeup
and predispositions to fail and make mistakes. This common bond of being human,
which to me means being flawed, is what makes human compassion so beautiful.
When it is our time to falter, someone will be there to save us from ourselves
because they can relate to the difficulties that come with simply existing as a
human being.
Throughout the entirety of my college career
I have been able to rely on my friend Natasha to help pull me out of my despair
when it is too much for me to handle on my own. I met Natasha during my
freshman year of college in my psychology class, and we have continued to be
close friends to this day. We are from completely opposite backgrounds and many
of our outlooks on major aspects of life, such as religiosity, conflict with
one another. However, Natasha seems to understand me better than anyone I know.
Our friendship makes me believe that “we inherit, as part of our humanity, a
collective unconscious; the mind is pre-figured by evolution just as is the
body.”[5]
Even though we come from different backgrounds, we are united by the simple
fact that we are both human. It is this truth that gives me faith that I can
help anyone with their problems, so long as I start by connecting with them at
the most basic human level. I want to be a therapist or a psychologist because
I want to lead people to better understand themselves so that they can learn
how to cope with the challenges that everyday life presents.
Dr. Bump has reiterated to our class the importance of being a leader because it is an essential part of helping others with their personal pilgrimages. When I think of a leader, I cannot help but to think of a CEO of some big business or of a king leading his troops into battle. Personally, I “feel rewarded as an individual contributor…and the challenges of leadership are of no continual or consistent interest.”[6] I have never had the desire to lead people, and for that matter, I have never thought of leadership as having any influence on how I live my life. If I have to consider myself a leader, I would like to think that I lead by example. If my lifestyle is the catalyst for a positive change in someone else’s life, even if it is just one person, then I will feel blessed. For me, leadership happens on a very small scale, by trying to have a positive impact on the small number of people I will encounter in my lifetime. In a world where so many people are materialistic and self-centered, I want to be an example of the positive effects of being selfless and giving your life to others. For me, being selfless means helping others with the simple daily tasks that can become burdensome. If a friend needs a ride somewhere because they do not have a car, or they need me to help them brainstorm ideas for a paper, I try to be there for them if at all possible. Even if helping others means that I have to go out of my way, I know that they will feel a sense of relief that rewards me with a feeling of deep gratification.
In my personal
experience, the circumstances that have given me the greatest satisfaction in
life, such as helping others, spending time with family and friends, and trying
to strengthen my personal relationship with God, have not been based on
material gain or personal glorification. During my lifetime, I have felt the
“problem of spiritual collapse in the West” and I have been “in search of a
modern human identity that lies beyond nationalism and material wealth.”[7] Being
raised in a modern, western civilization, I have seen the importance that has
been placed on monetary wealth and intellectual superiority. I have always been
of the mindset that it is “a great sin to value ‘intellectual excellence,’ …
more highly than moral submission.”[8] During
my years as a university student, I have been surrounded by students and
professors who try to exert their intellectual greatness over everyone else.
Some times I feel like I do not belong at the university, because I do not
place such a great 
importance on scholarly knowledge. While I do
believe you should learn to enrich your mind and views of the world, I place
more importance on the knowledge I learn by simply cohabitating with others. I
feel that college is too often used to simply equip a person with the
necessities to thrive in this industrialist society. Once a student is thrown
out into the real world, he is “left stranded at the commencement of [his]
voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real
desire for the ends which [he] had been so carefully fitted out to work for.”[9] It
is common knowledge that when many people reach the middle of their life they
have a “mid-life crisis.” They realize that the dreams they once had when they
were younger are no longer in sight and they start to feel the burden of basing
their existence on such temporal and worldly achievements. “If I had only…
forgotten future greatness and looked at the green things and the buildings and
reached out to those around me and smelled the air and ignored the forms and
the self-styled obligations….and it’s not too late.” [10]
My passion in life is to lead people away from the worldly mindset and remind
them that it is never too late to change yourself. Many of life’s stresses result
from attempting to meet some impossible criteria of greatness that has been
forced upon us by society. If we conform, and forget about the people in our
lives who really matter and who will always stand by our side regardless of any
failures, then we become the zombies that Dr. Bump always talks about.
I do not know where life is necessarily going
to take me or how long my life is going to be on Earth. This is what I do know:
If the number of cups of coffee I enjoy with friends outweighs my salary, I
will be truly blessed. If I get to outlive my parents and take care of them
with even half of the love that they gave to me, then I will be gracious. I
pray that I have the strength to stay humbled so that when I have the opportunity
to help myself, I instead help someone who needs it more. If my name is never published for contributing
some great scientific discovery, but my children and friends think fondly on me
long after I die, then I could not ask for more.
Word Count (not including quotes): 1,726
Word Count with quotes: 1,979
Omitted Word Count: 79