Our Youth Voice

I don’t know about any of you, but I often find myself thinking about the future and what it may look like. In a few short weeks, the school year will be over, and we’ll all be moving up a grade (may that be in high school, out of high school, or beyond). We’re not the same people we were when we started this great journey of life, and honesty, we’re not even getting warmed up yet. People change, that’s just in our nature, despite everything we do to try to stop it. This change comes at it’s own pace too, and this pace changes with who you talk to. No one is perfectly satisfied with their life, and they’ll tell you that. But time ultimately will come and wash all of these petty wishes away, leaving the ones that might actually have meaning.

This brings me to my first point: people ultimately want change. Even the happiest person on earth has something more they think might make them happy. This is just the way we are! There’s absolutely no use trying to hide it, deny it, or stop it. People living in poverty want riches, people living in riches wish they had a family. As much as they try to act like they don’t, do not be fooled. It’s perfectly okay to admit this. It’s a trait characteristic in every living organism – a desire to thrive. We don’t want to just live, we want to live comfortably (some more comfortably than others).

As we grow up, these desires and wishes are innocent and harmless. The new toy, to be able to play with siblings this very minute, so on, etc. When we get a bit older, however, and enter the dating scene, these desires may get a bit more scheming. Now we want him to be jealous that he left us, to get the grades that will allow us to go to the sparkling university of our dreams, avoid the overbearing eye of our parents. At each new stage, we realize the silly notions of the past level. We laugh them off without realizing that eventually the “cool”, new ideas we’re embracing now will soon become those we’re ridiculing of the past. For as long as high school seems, four years really aren’t long in the grand scheme of things, and the heartaches of the present will become the heartaches of the past.

People wonder why high school can be so hard. The truth of the matter is that this is the time where we’re discovering ourselves, our talents, our weaknesses, and our image of ourselves, and the only way to develop these ideas is to experience events that challenge our perception of our world. Like it or not, those events will sometimes hurt. How hard they hurt invariably depends on how you handle the situation. But I digress, how to handle painful situations is not the point of this article and shouldn’t be anyone other your decision.

Once we are adults and senior citizens, undoubtably we’ll look back and note these times with fondness, not remembering the pain and anxiety we once felt. Our desires will have changed to more reasonable goals. We hope to be able to pay bills, provide for families, and eventually not break our hips or need dentures. Even in age, humans tend to want something may it be material or otherwise. No matter how much of a conservative you are, there is still an amount of change that you wish to see take place in the world by the end of your lifetime.

So next time you feel upset about a particularly bad break-up, worried about your next job performance evaluation or AP European History exam that you really haven’t studied for just remember that eventually the waves of time will  caress the hurt of your heart and smooth out the pain, eventually eroding it to leave a peacefully blank space of sand for you to do whatever you wish with it.

-mmeyer