I am 17 years old. A teenager. A young man. I am intelligent. I scored well on my ACT and SAT, well above average. I participate in intellectual competitions and do reasonably well. And yet all the information I hold dear, all the learning that I want to remember, I learned outside of a classroom.
I heard a song yesterday and its last line is "Once you've lost it all, that's when you realize life is beautiful." It's true. We as human beings don't learn to hope until we've lost something precious. We don't learn to love until we've been hurt by hate. We don't learn to see the beauty of the world until we've been facedown in the dirt and scum of it.
I know this life is beautiful! I know what it is to hope. And I have loved so deeply and passionately that it threatened to tear me from my mortal chains and translate me into...nirvana/heaven/whatever it is.
A classroom doesn't teach you to hope, to love, to see the truth. A classroom teaches you "facts" and nothing else. A classroom teaches you how to do math, how to memorize set ideas and standards, and how to play the system. It doesn't actually teach you anything of value and yet I know that by being in school, I have learned things worth more than Solomon's mines.
I have a friend. She is beautiful and kind and sweet and I love her. She is an angel. Oddly enough, our entire relationship has been void of anything of a physical nature. We're not dating, but we love each more passionately than any lovers have before us. It's funny really, we're so close and yet we make sure that nothing physical happens. It's an unspoken rule. One day, we were having lunch and talking and she was eating an apple. Now this may seem strange, but she eats apples differently than everyone I've ever met. She doesn't just eat it, she savors it. And she doesn't stop where most people would, no no no, she eats the apple down to the core. When she is done, all that's left are the seeds and the stem. It's amazing and I commented to her about it and she said that's just the way she's always done it. She bites off more than most people and savors it until the last bit of juicy flesh.
It was this same girl who grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and forced me to wash my face after I had fallen, facedown, into the scum. She was the one who taught me to never hate, even your enemies, even those who wish you were dead, but to love and love and love, because even the hardest heart cannot hate one who truly and honestly loves them. They may not return the love, but they cannot hate. She taught me to never regret, no matter what the situation! One can always learn from mistakes and all knowledge is worth it, if we use it. So we should never regret, because we should always be learning and growing.
I'm lucky. Most of the important learning I've had so far has been from one person. Most people learn from dozens of people throughout their entire life and I'm sure I will too. But I have learned so much, at a young age, and I often wonder if I'm worth it, but I know that as long as I have my angel in my life, I'll be alright.
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