#this is believe

[land-of-brains-and-chocolate]

cannot emphasise enough that symbruary’s spirit of the season is half-assery. why do you think i reduced the number of prompts by half. quick contributions are great, few contributions are great, one contribution is great. it is simply about having love and slime in your heart

[survivalofthedreamer]

You only have what you give. It's by spending yourself that you become rich.

Isabel Allende

[yoquieromifoto]

Our God is three in one...

[yesiamanatural-blue]

High school is like going into a department store to shop for life. Everyone is like “Here! Try on this life, and this life, and this life” but none of the lives quite fit, so you try to leave but all the doors are locked so you just go back to the dressing room where all the teachers are throwing overpriced life at you.

[sunshineinthecellar]

Disrupting my comfort zone, bombarding myself with challenging people and situations, this is the best way I know to keep growing. And to paraphrase a biologist I once met, if you're not growing, you're dying.

Brian Grazer's personal philosophy, This I Believe

[laughingrachel]

Right now I'm doing an assignment for my speech communications class

This assignment is actually super interesting.

It's to listen to 3 "This I believe" speeches from thisIbelieve.org and talk about our reactions to them and recommend one for the class to listen too. I just listened to an amazing one. It's called I Could Be Wrong and it's written by Allan Barger and you should definitely check it out. It's only 4 minutes long. The intro and exit that the Bob Edwards Show puts on it is kind of annoying, so even just read it. 

Anyway, we eventually have to write our own 350-500 word This I Believe essay to read aloud to the class and I don't know what to write about yet. I have so many core beliefs and we have to ground it in the events of our own life and tell a story, but many of my beliefs have come out of things I might not necessarily want to share with a class full of strangers. 

[imfarfromhome]

i did not expect to have to write this for a natural resources class.

this i believe

Two years ago, I stood in front of my graduating class dressed in my graduation robe. As Head Boy it was my duty to give a valedictory speech, as we left high school after five long years. I stood in front of the crowd of peers and parents and looked out upon them. Some of the students I had known before I could speak; others I had never spoken to. I was expected to give trite words of wisdom – wisdom and knowledge that can only be obtained with age and experience, two things that seventeen year olds sorely lack; I was expected to sum up the experience of high school into a five minute speech, which, simply speaking, was an impossible task.

I admitted this to my class, explained that high school is too much to too many people for me to ever say anything meaningful to everyone. Instead I took the opportunity to say goodbye to everyone; to acknowledge that we shared an important experience together, no matter what we felt about it and what would come next. “So, on behalf of the graduating class of 2009, I say goodbye to you all,” I said. My voice was a little rough. “I will miss you.”

Although I couldn’t understand or explain the beauty and importance of what had happened in those last five years, not in any lucid or intelligible way, I knew that something of great importance had occurred. I could feel and see the wonder of what had happened, but I could not understand or explain to anyone why.

This is how I feel about most of my life.

I am young – astoundingly, amazingly young. The potential of my life stretches before me and I cannot fathom how much there is yet to explore. I’ve seen so very little of the world, experienced almost nothing, and yet I feel existence on earth, the entire concept of existence in the universe, to be so amazing that sometimes I feel like I can’t hold all the wonder in my head. But I have no idea what it is in this world that fills me with this wonder and hope.

It’s not God: that I’m pretty certain of. If the Big Guy has something to say to me, I’ll listen, but he hasn’t said boo yet.

It’s not from a single dream or goal I can pin down. I don’t wake up wanting to save the rainforest; I’m not driven to right a specific societal wrong.

I’ve always been somewhat scornful of those that profess strong thoughts and beliefs at a young age – even scornful of myself when I did the same. I feel as if at this young age I change too much from month to month, from week to week, to begin to have a coherent belief system that I could explain. I’ve attempted to label my religious and political beliefs in the past, but I found that what I believed changed too often, and the labels never quite stuck right with me.

As far as I can tell, I am just excited by the fact that I have a future ahead of me that I can shape into something that I desire. Perhaps in the future, when I have had a few more life experiences, I will able to pinpoint what I want out of my life. For now, I am content – more than content – to simply bask in the glory of that which might be and take steps in what I hope are the right direction.

That’s why being given the chance to say goodbye to my year group was one of sweetest moments of my life. To be given the opportunity to speak to a group of people and be the one to acknowledge how amazing the time we spent together was – even though it was important for such an unfathomably complicated multitude of reasons – an opportunity to acknowledge that same beauty and hope I hold in my heart.

I don’t know why it’s there, I don’t know where it came from. I just believe that my life is, and will be, full of wonder, and that’s enough for me.

what relevance this had to sustainability, I'm not sure. but it sure was a fun class.

in any case, that is, quite literally, my story.