What do you value most in life? What helps you think clearly about right and wrong? How will you make your "choice of life"? These are a few of the questions your essay might answer. What ever question or questions you choose to consider, your essay should have: a title; a beginning that engages the reader; continuity and clarity from one paragraph to the next; in the end, a single, clear, developed idea. It will be graded, as always, on DETAIL, LANGUAGE, and THINKING. It is due on Monday, November 7.
“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” said Thomas Edison. I was taught this quote since elementary school, and since then it has become my philosophy of life. There are geniuses, who luckily won the biased love of god and became his favorite children, with extraordinary aptitude or athletic capability. Undeniably, success finds its way to these gifted ones more frequently than others. However, there are still numerous inhabitants on earth that are not blessed by Mother Nature, do they perish? No. They still prevail, wrestling with the devastating waves in the stormy, chaotic sea of life, giving their best to transcend the seemingly impenetrable limitations that they are born with. That strength and mental toughness is called persistence, which is the most valuable thing for a normal person to survive and succeed in this competitive world.
As soon as I have developed a fairly mature mind, I realized that I am not one of those special people, the gifted ones. I usually forget things; therefore, I spend more time learning and memorizing things than other people. I struggle with math equations and geometry, which my friends think are very easy.
Even at nonacademic things like art and small talents, I am still bad. I cannot do origami, can only draw stick figures and can never reach the right pitch of a note. I know the old Vietnamese saying: “Each person is a flower, though they have different time to blossom,” just that until now, I have not figured out my blossom time. And so the taste of being a complete failure grew bitter and bitter as each day past, torturing my head and shattering my heart.
Luckily, a solution came to my mind, like a sight for sore eyes. I began to work harder, spending twice, sometimes thrice the time than everyone else to make up for my disadvantages, trying to never give up on any problems or hard words. It turned out that, struggling with the work for consecutive hours did not prove to be fruitless at all. Good grades began to appear on my test results, I could draw more beautiful things and I sang much better. At that time, I knew that it does not matter how un-talented I am; as long as I am persistent, I can do things as well as everyone else does, and that includes racing in the cross country team.
I remember well the absurd weather of last week; a blizzard in the middle of October! It was freezing outside, and Mother Nature unleashed her unreasonable anger in the form of brutal, merciless blows of wind, lifting up anything vulnerable in their wake only to smash them back to the ground. Snowflakes are also mixed in with the wind, scattered on the ground. However, the cross country team and I did not have the time or willingness to be aghast by those things, because we still have a race to run.
Since an hour before the race, I had been so engrossed in the fantasy, or prayer, that someone would cancel the race, that we can all go back into the building, sit near the heater and have conversations full of laughter. But the man’s voice rudely awakened me and brought me back to the bitter reality:
“Runners set!”
A weird and somehow deafening silence was created at that moment. Absent-mindedly did I gaze at the sky and the snowflakes on the ground. Three seconds seemed like eternity.
“Go!”
The crystal clear, high-pitched whistle permeated through the thick air, like the horns before a big warfare. The next things that came to my eyes were the several legs moving past the field now covered with a blanket of fresh white snow, my own legs moving and the scenery on my sides starting to go backwards.
Everyone was moving further away from me, and after a brief moment, I was almost alone, isolated. However, I had other things to worry about. The wind was screeching next to my ears, and the frigid air was stealthily approaching me, slowly permeating through my jacket and played with my vulnerable skin until it shivered. I started to pant, but every gulp of air simultaneously overwhelmed my lungs with the frosted air, making me feel more irritated and tired.
Along both sides of the course are people cheering our team, but as I past them, the cheers sounded like something distorted. “Stop cheering, let me race peacefully! I will do it better if you do not cheer me!”- I thought. Maybe the snow and extreme cold – which I have never seen or experienced before – had made me become grumpy.
“Oh no! My right shoe’s shoelaces are untied! Wait, I need to be calm and finish this race, I can still run even when my shoe laces are untied. Now what? A large area of mud? I have to jump!”
But there is no use, that mud puddle was too big to avoid and I could not divert from the course. Normally, it just felt a bit wet but because my shoelaces were untied, my right shoe came off. The cold air did not miss that chance, I felt like a surge of ice was covering my foot, freezing it bit by bit. I started to slow down and staggered back to get the shoe.
Two people passed me while I was retrieving it, looking tired but have a slight smile on their face. Not wanting to lose any more precious time, I just put it on without tying. I did not know what was worse, with or without the shoes because the water in the mud puddle made it much more uncomfortable.
In the next half mile, the shoe kept coming off and each time I had to come back to get it, resulting in a couple of people passing me, each chipped away my already little confidence and hope. I tried to run as fast as I could, but I could not do much. In my mind, several things jumbled and clocked together. Should I quit, going back to the coach and said that I have done my best ? If I continue, there is a chance that my foot would be frozen and get frostbitten, or I may trip and fall and hurt myself. After a brief moment of thinking, I decided to continue. I had wanted to change myself along time ago, being free from a heavy academic and nonathletic schedule in Vietnam. I raved to do a sport, to challenge myself physically, to go beyond my limits.
I also prepared a lot for this occasion, letting those sweat-and-blood practices become fruitless is such a waste! “From losing everyone in the warm-ups at the beginning of the season, I was able to catch up with them and ran multiple miles, will I let my effort wasted and become a quitter?” The answer is: “No”. Fed up with my sneakers and, with great determination, I took both of them off. Somewhere behind me, someone shouted out faintly: “You are crazy, An!” but I just ignored it. I ran the last mile with only socks, soaked with water and frozen.
Now, without my shoes, I was hurt by the sharp rocks and my feet were deeply in mud each time I ran through them. I began to lose feeling in my feet, and suddenly felt how silly it was because they felt just like two light wooden sticks. Not only my body became numb but my brain was freezing too. With the wind drilling into my ears, I have nothing in my mind but the thought just keep running. The last thing on my mind was about my parents, how they love me so much and how proud they would be if they know that I did not quit…
And I finished, alone, without anyone cheering because they are all inside to hide from the blizzard. I saw the coach, smiled with him and tried to tell him about my shoes. However, I realized that my mouth was frozen too, and I could not move my lips and cheek muscles. Therefore, I just pointed to my feet, let out a small, unidentified sound to get his attention. He quickly realized what had happened and quickly brought me to the sport trainer. There, I was given warm towels to wrap my hands and feet, which both really hurt because of frostbite and I told the coach the whole story.
The reason that makes persistence valuable is the fact that life is not easy. To anyone apart from geniuses, it always has ups and downs, revealing its edgy, hazardous side. It is so easy to enjoy the luck and sweet happiness that life brings to us, but the challenges and failure can discourage anyone and bring them down.
Therefore, persistence gives us the power to overcome obstacles in life, and even if we fail, it fills up the hole in our mind made by that failure so that we can move on. However, this mental toughness is as fragile and ephemeral as it is powerful. It can be damaged or shattered by any discouraging thoughts, and will not exist in a weak heart without faith.
In other words, it transfers the strength of the happy moments or the things that we treasure most. For me, the thing that gave me power was my family, especially my parents. With persistence, I showed to everyone else, and more importantly, to myself, that I can transcend my limits if I am persistent.
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