Website just about wrapped up!
Finally!
Ok, so I'll be sending out a mass email to everyone, and please everyone send it on to anyone you think would be interested.
The basics are all pretty much done now, but there are some details that I'll be spiffing up within the next couple of days, and adding some pictures, since the site is pretty spare right now. I'll also continue to add things as I get more information, or find new stuff that would be fun to share.
Please please please let me know what you think! Post comments here or email me, from any number of links on the page.
Have fun surfing!
http://homepage.mac.com/sekaidesu
-Alicia
posted by A Champlin @ 6/28/2005 12:15:00 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
One of the most compelling aspects of this project is how keenly conscious of the positive impact you may have on others. But that you set an example for other students curious about stretching their educational horizons is only a part of the story.
Alicia, you blithely describe yourself as a non-traditional student - and so you are. But by discarding the label itself (you are actually non-traditional in all kinds of irresistable ways) we might see that the life experienced and the trials overcome provide a lesson in resilience and as such serve up a dose of inspiration far broader in reach. So the question begs: what of this road that brought you here? Where did it take you? What did you learn?
It should be noted that there's nothing wrong with someone knowing their path from an early age. If truth be told, I used to think (with frustrated envy) that those people for whom this was the case were truly lucky, blessed by some mysterious insight and a substantial head-start. I don't feel this way anymore.
But knowing what it is that you want and working through the long process to achieve it doesn't just "happen" to everyone. For the rest of us, it becomes our own [Quixotic] quest to define for ourselves a way of thinking about destiny and purpose; it takes self-knowledge, substantial effort and calls for some very tough choices.
If it so happens that you are blessed with a vividly creative and agile intellect (those readers who know you Alicia will recognize this as serious understatement) you can't help but be aware of how boundless your potential really is - and that it seems like all of life's possibilities are rushing past, being snatched up by those with early bloom or privilege.
What I'm trying to get at is: how many of us give up at this point - in our teens, twenties, even later - and fall out of step with what we know we can be and bemoan that which might have been? It's as if we watch it recede with the tide and - discouraged - turn and walk off the beach, not yet fully aware that what we have been looking at is the Sea and that _it_will_always_come_back_. It is life experience that tells us to watch the tides. And that what comes tomorrow morning or next summer or ten years later may make us feel very happy indeed that we waited.
There is a work by Longfellow that has one of American poetry's most quoted passages. The poem is of course named "A Psalm Of Life" and the famously cited stanza is this:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;
Celebrated words and fittingly so, but viewed isolated from the rest of the work this is really a [beautifully written] self-motiviational missive; eloquent innerspeak about allowing ourselves to be inspired within our own lives.
But Psalm Of Life was not a four line poem, and objectivism putatively not Longfellow's core belief set. It is what comes next that - to me - really delivers the gravitas here:
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
In the next year, who knows who will be reading the account of your adventures, taking heart in your bootstrap journey along the scenic route and how it made you who you are? And how so many of us are so glad it did?
(...hitcount is climbing....)
Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait. HWL
Post a Comment
<< Home