Best of Week: Never Take Your Life For Granted

                 Being on this earth for 17 years I have never encountered anything standing in my way to a bright future but myself, but children in India can't say the same. Imagine at 8 years old your mom looks at you and says you need to start prostitution to be able to bring home money for her to able to feed you. Many of us would probably give our moms weird looks or question her mental health, but children in India, if not given a proper education, are forced into prostitution as their only source of income. Born into Brothels, directed by Zana Briski, reveals the hardships kids in India have to go through to have a normal life making me realize just how lucky I am to have the life I was given.
                   As we grow up our emotions tend to blend with our reactions and it really shows when young Indian children are being yelled at by their parents using vulgar words and they almost seem to be used to it. Seeing this reaction on the children's face made me think about how long they have been treated like this and what truly makes parents act like this. Does the lack of money create such problems and pressures that the parents drop everything on the kids or is it just India's society? But, if the lack of money does create such problems I fear the United States' future. As our economy slowly falls into a slump, I wonder how American families today will compare to American families in 20 years, but I guess we will just have to wait and see.
                    Growing up in the suburban setting has dampened the outside world from all of us with in the suburban bubble. What happens in the bubble can never cause any harm but imagination can only piece together what happens outside of the bubble. The issues happening around the world such as the problems raised in Born into Brothels barely even reach the surface of the bubble for us to get a glimpse  of what is truly happening. I think we all need to step outside of the suburban bubble and look around. We need to help those in need who aren't as fortunate as we are. We take for granted everything we have been given since birth and barely take time to stop and just say thank you for the amazing life we have been given. We all need to take away this lesson and use it to it's fullest potential. Take time out of your life to change somebody else's life and while you do, reflect on your life and realizes how lucky you are and how much you have taken for granted. An eye for an eye may not make the whole world blind, it may clear up our vision to truly see what is out there.

Connection: Transcendentalists and Richard Feyman

              There are 365 days a year, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 60 minutes per hour, and 60 seconds per minute. As busy as we perceive ourselves to be, we have more time than anything in the world. With all that time however, we take for granted the amazing world we have all been given. This theory was used in both Transcendentalists and Richard Feyman's teachings.
               Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most famous Transcendentalists, encourages all of us to find, "an original relation to the universe" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Russell Goodman). Through the observation of nature, Emerson's creativity flourished and thus his writing became a second voice for nature. Emerson believed nature held the key to individualism and by finding your place in nature you too could flourish along with your creativity. If you were to look at any of Emerson's masterpiece writings,  you would see how much nature inspired him. Nature fed his creativity and encouraged him to write beautiful pieces of work that are still used today to get kids outside to find their own place in the world. What we can all take away from Emerson's hard work is that we should not take our beautiful world for granted. You should take 60 seconds of your day to step outside and be inspired by the nature that surrounds us and you too could become a Transcendentalist.
                The beauty of science is a concept not many of us understand, but Richard Feyman lived and breathed this concept. Richard Feyman brought up a scenario of a person holding a flower. If that person were to show an artist that flower they could point out how beautiful it is just by looking at it. However,  if that person were to show a scientist that flower they would pull the flower apart having it become dull instantly. Richard Feyman couldn't disagree anymore with the scenario. Richard Feyman speaks for the scientists and states that because he is a scientist he could find more ways of why that flower is beautiful. He believes that beauty doesn't just stop at this dimension. As a scientist , he could look inside of that flower and see it's cells and more, making it that more beautiful. Richard Feyman teaches us all to go outside and indulge in nature, but not by just looking at it, but by being a part of it. We shouldn't see things as one dimensional. We should look to discover something new and by looking at nature in all dimensions your creativity will flourish along with your sense of nature. By opening your eyes to a whole new world, you open your life to unlimited possibilities.
                 Nature is all around us yet we never seem to have time to indulge in all of its beauty. Transcendentalists and Richard Feyman teach us to find ourselves in nature. Their lives have been shaped by nature and the creativity nature has brought them. They too want us to experience all the world has to offer by just talking that step outside to discover our surroundings. Transcendentalists and Richard Feyman both inform each other on different ways to discover nature. Transcendentalists encourage you to put more of a mark on the world to call it your own. Meanwhile, Richard Feyman encourages to discover more than what is in front of you, look in depth to find the true beauty in nature. This relationship between Transcendentalists and Richard Feyman matters to me because I too love nature but have gotten so caught up in school and my social life that I have let nature slip between my fingers. This relationship has made me realize how much I need nature back in my life, especially for humanities.  It will help to keep my creativity flowing and to help me find who I truly am for my college essays. I never realized how much I took nature for granted until now. From this point forward, I will carry the Transcendentalists and Richard Feyman's teachings with me to help my creativity flourish and to look at the world in different dimensions.

Carry It Forward: Hindsight Bias

Last night, I sat awake at 3:30 AM studying for my AP Psych quiz by reading Myers' Psychology for AP, by David G. Meyers. At 3:30 in the morning, you can imagine the thought process is barely functioning, but when studying psychology you almost need to forget your original thought process and fall into that of a psychologist's. One of the terms that sat with me for the longest is hindsight bias. Hindsight Bias as defined by Myers' Psychology for AP, written by David G. Myers, is the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have for seen it.  An I-know-it-all phenomenon. I can't even explain how fast the light bulb hovering above my head lit up when I came across this term. It just makes so much sense and has brought clarity to my life. The value of this term in my life is to bring me down to reality and realize I don't know what the future will bring, but when it happens I know I couldn't have done anything about it. When I saw my Uncle Jon in the hospital diagnosed with Lung Cancer, I truly believed he wasn't going to die, but when he passed away everyone kept saying that they knew it was going to happen and with those comments a fire brewed inside of me. If they really "knew it was going to happen" why didn't they do something? The reason why they didn't do something is because of hindsight bias, they never really knew what was going to happen until an outcome prevailed. How I will use hindsight bias in my present and future life is to never judge someone on their past actions. If someone knew something bad was going to happen based on that one choice do you really think they would have done it? No. It's hard to ease up and accept things for as they are or to admit you were wrong, but to pretend like I knew it was going to happen is even more insulting to others about their choices. No one knows what the future holds and if they did what would be the point of living? We will all live our own lives and let fate take us to where it believes we belong, without any hindsight bias commentary afterwards.