She sits alone in the field, the wind blowing into her face and making her hair flow smoothly behind her. The grass moves like soft waves on a calm ocean and the trees surrounding her sway softly. Sun light warms her face and illuminates the colours around her forming different shades of vibrant greens contrasting and embracing each other. A butterfly flutters down onto the girls left knee and sits there basking in the light without any caution. The mountain off to the girls’ right with its purple composure and snow-capped peak is her primary focus as she looks up and down from her sketch pad. She vividly tries to capture each and every detail and aspect of this beautiful place.

The wind makes her cold as the sun moves behind a cloud and leaves the field without colour. The trees and grass no longer dance but rather battle over which is green and which is not. The slow rolling waves of the grass now look like rough seas that not even an experienced fisherman could handle. The mountain with its once welcoming purple hue has turned into a looming black and the butterfly that came to the girl for warmth and comfort has now begun to fly away as none of that is left for it. The girl stops drawing and looks up from her pad, her world that once was happy, peaceful and welcoming is now sad, violent and deserted.

The wind changes direction and pushes the cloud away. Sun and warmth return to the field and the purple and greens reappearance are deeply welcomed by the girl. As she returns to her drawing she feels the warmth embracing her and her hair that flows in the wind behind her. The butterfly that once deserted her returns and rests on her shoulder. She contemplates shooing it away seeing as it did not stay when the slightest thing went wrong. She forgives it and says to herself:

“Isn’t it amazing that one simple action, whether it’s in your hands or not, can cast a shadow over everything around you, make friends flee and force your whole world to change, if only for a second.”

She sits in the field, not alone but with the wisdom that although how perfect something might seem, it can still leave you stranded in the darkest of moments.

I have realised that to truly understand ourselves and how we rate as people, you require other people to be around you. You cannot rate who you are as a person until you are placed in a position that requires you to be personable. I’ve always considered myself as a person who is open, understanding, co-operative and able to present myself in a manner that would suit most people’s tastes. I might still be all these things but not to the extent that I once thought I was.

I like to think of myself as a person who laughs a lot, and laughs proudly. This idea is based off the fact that I find most jokes funny, scratch that, 99% of jokes are hilarious and the remainder are mildly amusing. But out of the vast number of situations that I find myself laughing in, my two best friends always seem to be the ones that make me laugh the most. Of course that is a bit cliché, ‘my two best friends make me laugh the most’, sure, but now honestly take a look at your ‘laughing history’ and think back to the last time when you found yourself in fits of laughter that you felt like your inside were about to be bruised. I know my last time was the other night when a group of us (including the aforementioned best friends) went to the movies. We were all sitting at a table after the movie and while the remainder of the group were involved heavily in what I presume was a deep conversation, I wasn’t paying attention, my two best friends and I were sitting at one  end talking amongst ourselves and laughing so hard that I honestly thought my insides were about to explode. To be honest with you, I really don’t think I would have been laughing that hard if it were any other combination of my other friends. There is just something that makes me relax and be myself around these two people.

What I find intriguing is that they aren’t just two friends that I can have a good laugh with, they are also my sounding boards (probably more-so than they think), my life consultants and just two people who have shaped who I am today. As much as I would like to think that I am the same to them, I doubt I am. The way you view another person is not the same way they view you, they could view you in a more positive manner but they could also view you in a negative light too. One thing I do doubt is that they see me in a negative light, but the chances of them thinking the same way as me as I do them is remote and almost absurd. But still, it is a nice thought, to think that I mean something to someone.

I should mention that although these two people aren’t my only best friends in the whole world, I would consider them to be high up on the theoretical chart. But that in itself eliminates the purpose of best friends. My definition of a best friend would be a person who you enjoy being around, who you respect, who you trust, who would never judge you, who would support you in everything you attempt and who shares this definition of best friends as you. So a scale of who is the better friend is out of the question as that would involve judging someone. However, no one can even begin to compete with my amazing girlfriend who truly is a best friend and more to me.

I never had ‘best-friends’ in primary school, let alone the first 3 years of high school, but as long as they have been in my life I have started enjoying it. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy life before; it’s just that I never had an opinion on it. It was what it was, not as it is now: grand, eventful, fun and entirely up to me to decide what I want to do with it. I’m afraid to be cliché again, but I cannot remember what my life was like before I had these people in it and although I could worry about that and come to the conclusion that I am suffering from amnesia, I’m choosing not to. For the first time in a long time I can’t wait to get up in the morning and see what is in store for me during that day and what hilarious situation I’m going to be laughing at.

My best friends, no matter how weird they might be or how incredibly insightful they are, are still just that, my best friends. And I wouldn’t be the same person I am today if it weren’t for them.

Throughout the ages different major discoveries and advancements both culturally and intellectually have allowed our species to thrive and flourish. From our physical and mental development in the Stone Age to our ability to change the world around us with the assistance of our own creations in the machine age, the basic rock paintings and chanting’s of our pre-historic ancestors to the grand mosaics and masterpieces of the Renaissance, our giant never ending thirst for knowledge that has never truly been bounded by nation or race, these aspects are what makes us human and separates us from the other animals. This human ability to create, manipulate and imagine the world around us to what it could be is what has shaped us to the result you see today. Yet I am scared for our future, scared of what lies ahead for our little species. We have learnt so much in such little time that we haven’t learnt how to use this knowledge effectively.

The discovery of coal and oil during the Industrial Revolution led to the expansive growth of our need and reliance on these resources. It was at this point in time where our concept of the world began to shift and mutate. This ability to have a life of comfort without any extra effort was a dream come true. We did not need candles or lamps which required tedious effort and concentration just to light at times, instead with the simple flick of a switch we could see through the darkness. It no longer took a dozen horses, which each required feeding and maintaining, to move from one side of town to the other; only a simple four wheeled metallic box which only required the occasional refill of a liquid which at the time was quite abundant. If all of these failed to impress you then how about your own personal theatre in your living room where each night a series of programs were displayed just for your entertainment? Skip ahead a hundred or so years to today, these magnificent creations are now not just there to make things easier; our lives are structured around the use of them. Lights, cars and televisions are all around you and you cater your every move to facilitate them, not vice versa as some might think.

We once lived in an age of darkness where religion ruled and we were forced to succumb to them by fear of the afterlife resulting in a period of little to no advancements what so ever. This was followed by the Renaissance, an age of arts and culture where the human race truly showed what we could create. Then came the age of Enlightenment and Reason, a period where our greatest thinkers created morals and laws which still influence our decisions today. Of course none of these periods just happened and weren’t brought in without great struggle. However what troubles me, what makes me worried for our future, concerned for our ability to be humans, is that we are entering another dark age.

While it might not be run by the churches or the religious leaders of the world, it is being run by the media and governments. We are told, not given the choice, how to live our lives. This is not enforced by the police or the laws which might seem the likely culprits, but we are told to live our lives by each other. Yet we do not know this.

Leonardo da Vinci was told that his obsession with flight was impossible to achieve, that flight was a possession of the birds. Yet even with his criticisms he followed his passion and while we don’t know if he achieved flight, we do know that his designs of flying machines have inspired others after his time to achieve this shared dream of flight. Some would even argue that is was da Vinci’s critics who pushed him to continue his dream, it was his driving force.

With the rise of a global community it is now easier for people to be critics. With a rise of critics, people have become more and more self-conscious.

With a larger amount of self-conscious people, the desire to put ourselves into the spot light with our creations weakens.

Without people who are comfortable to put themselves and their creations ‘out-there’, our level of creation and imagination on a large scale becomes less and less.

Music today is already suffering from the lack of creativity, our architecture is following suit along with the programming of our televisions. These are just the immediate effects of a society crumbling from a lack of what humanity truly is: the ability to create things that have not been created, to dream dreams that aren’t yet made and to manipulate the world around us to facilitate our lifestyles. The long term effects are far worse, changing morals, manipulated beliefs and corruption. With immediate gain comes future loss, we have gained endless amounts of knowledge and culture over the past 700 years, how much are we about to lose? Or do we simply wait out this coming dark age and hope that on the other side our morals and society hasn’t crumbled so much that only our skin and bones are recognisable in the pile of rubble that is soon to be this world?

We are at a tipping point, do we allow the media to stimulate this fear of judgement from our peers and force us into another dark age? Or have we learnt from the past 700 years to throw off these oppressors and create a world which is constantly being fuelled by culture and science?

If I leave you with anything, let it be this: do not fear those who might judge you, as they only judge because they fear you might be a greater person then they.

How do you know if you doing the right thing by you? Sure it is easy to make assumptions if you’re being right by other people, and they usually turn out for the best. But when it comes to your own feelings, beliefs and just general well-being, do we ever know what the right thing is? And to even begin to answer this, what is ‘the right thing’?

Corporations around the world spend millions of dollars to get an outside opinion on their finances, operations and management. Essentially they come in and look at anything and everything to do with the business and they determine what could be done to make it more efficient. This can lead to a better workplace, a more efficient system to deal with the workload and a more profitable business. On the other hand it can also lead to layoffs and a less motivated workforce which is unhappy and dissatisfied.

The comparison from corporate to personal life in regards to an outside opinion is not that diverse. Being in a relationship, not coping with school work or friend issues can all be classified as items that would require assistance from a friend. And with all this the opinion of a friend is one that can be more powerful than the opinion of an outside firm to a corporation. They actually care about you, and even if you don’t like their advice it will stay with you and then will cause you to act on it.

Well why ask for an opinion? An outside opinion can be brutal but so often true, and although you might hate to admit it, it is right an unbelievably high percentage of the time. With this brutality you can actually understand a situation that is absorbing you without the fog of your own opinions and prejudices which so often cloud your judgement.

Two really good friends of mine which I hold quite close to my heart recently gave me some advice on a relationship of mine. I asked them both at separate times and they really surprised me to the answers given. They both put forth their opinions and really summed up every confusion, every doubt and every hesitation I had into a single question that I needed to answer. This question isn’t important, what is however is that the opinion of another human being can be just as important if not more than your own in matters that revolve around yourself.

It might be a hard concept to grasp; in fact I’ve only just come to terms with it after 17 years, as much as it might not seem so at times, people do care about you and they want to help. We as a species care for one another over our entire lifetimes, something that none other has seemed to achieve, and if they can’t help a problem directly the next best thing is to just let them give you their opinion and advice. It’s more powerful than you might think.

If your only desire in life is to just live carelessly without any regrets that is your choice. But I prefer making decisions that will inevitably decide my fate, and to make a decision that is as important and heavily weighted as this it is best to get your facts straight. My outside firm is my friends and while they might not realise this I respect each and every one of them. I go to them with my problems, and it might take a few discussions but in the end what I receive from them is something that alters my life, my outlook and my understanding of events. So next time someone comes to you for advice keep in mind that they have chosen you out of many and your opinion is important to them.

Polite: ‘Having or showing respectful and considerate behaviour.’ – Dictonary.com

Since last year I have always had this profound faith in the human race. I believed that the nations of earth would one day unite and we could finally live in a world of harmony with our fellow man to achieve new scientific and cultural heights. I was however wrong in this. One of the key primal instincts in our species is to be the ‘top dog’, alpha male if you will, and of course that will involve eliminating the other alpha males, your competition among the group. This is all in reference to our primate ancestors but the thing is that the concept still remains today, evolution or whichever other theory you might believe in has failed to prepare us for living in a large group of other beings that are different in many or few possible ways. Of course I should mention that this is most certainly my own personal belief, but hopefully some agreement is among us.

Being able to live in a society (be it united across the globe or within just one suburb), is being able to understand our fellow man and being able to practise a certain level of sense in situations that you might come across.

More to the topic however, a different faith of mine has recently disappeared. I once believed in our species ability to understand what another person might be thinking or feeling and our ability to adapt so that they might not go through any displeasure. This ability is probably more commonly known as politeness, unannounced to me politeness isn’t that common.

I study in a high school of two thousand and something students and it has amazed, nay, astounded me the number of people who continue to lack a certain thought process that to most people I would hope is second nature. If you are on a staircase that is clearly labelled to remain on the left hand side, please do not be annoying or problematic and use the whole staircase for your own personal use! As you can tell, situations like these have happened to me before.

On my way to class when it seemed to be a particularly windy day which always seems to put me in a bad or at least sleepy mood, I managed to find the staircase to my next class moderately uninhabited. Rather pleased with this find I ran up the first four flights. However to my shock and horror I had stumbled across the dreaded grade eight three headed monster whose only weapon of both defence and attack was a constant babble of nonsense which dripped from each mouth and toxic to all those who heard it. I tried to slip around its left Country Road Tote bag but it continued to ignore my existence. On the right side similar efforts continued to be ignored. The creature seemed to be slowing down its rate of climb within the staircase which in turn, was slowly becoming the tomb of my death and to my dread the amount of mindless babble being extruded from its three ungodly mouths was increasing. My rather high level of patience was being bent and strained to the point where it could bend nor strain any longer. A rather polite and courteous tap on the middle shoulder lead all three to turn around bearing their teeth. A simple ‘excuse me’ would of sufficed but as I was rather ticked off about the aforementioned events I decided the low road looked quite nice this time of day. ‘As you young ladies are obviously aware but chose not to acknowledge, I have been stuck behind you for some time now while the three of you mindlessly drone on’ I recited almost as if a professional payout artist had been hired and was writing a script, ‘I was almost astounded that I heard Justin Biebers name appear once or twice in your pitiful excuse for a conversation, while on the other hand I continue to be late for my next class. So if you don’t mind, I will gladly pass through between you three and bid you adieu.’

Every time one of these three girls has passed me whether it be in the same staircase or even on the footpath, never has eye contact been made, let alone any form of conversation.

Peoples lack to understand their surroundings is from a simple lack of motivational power. We cannot do anything if our minds are not motivated enough.

If our society is ever to advance then politeness is something that we need to work on. We might think that with our technology and culture as it stands today makes us advanced or evolved, we are quite mistaken. The simplest skill which we thought most people understood with ease is probably the least used skill today, while it remains the most important.

Being able to laugh at yourself is probably one of the most important skills a person can have. Not just for your own mental health but for the people around you too. If you do or say something that probably could have had a better outcome, and don’t embrace the fact that you are now a source of entertainment for five minutes, it’s going to bring you down.

A couple of my good friends have this habit of saying “That’s what she said!” to nearly anything said in a conversation. 95% of the time it makes absolutely no sense what so ever and we all have a laugh. But the other day my friends and I were walking from class and in conversation I said “I wish we could just hurry up and get this year over with you know?” To which two of them replied in unison, THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID! Obviously both of their inappropriate radars heard the ‘hurry up and get this over with’part and instantly kicked into action. So with a raised eyebrow and my questioning face on I looked at them and wondered why on earth I let these people around me. In whole context the line does not make much sense, but we all had a laugh and realised that their mistake was rather funny. After dozens of answers as to why they should be allowed to remain here with dignity, I let the comment slide without a sarcastic remark. Nonetheless this just goes to show how important it is to have a laugh at yourself.

Not laughing at yourself can really mess up a person’s mood and mentality. A girl in one of my classes who likes to, for lack of a more realistic word, enforce her opinion onto others. Such as when the class is laughing at a joke, not necessarily at anything or anyone in particular, she likes to scoff loudly and turn her head to face the board of the ‘U’ shaped desk layout. Away from the rest of her peers. If the class is particularly loud or having quite a good chuckle then she will yell, not just talk over everyone, yell at the other students to be quiet. Now of course she doesn’t want to seem as the lame one so she blames it on having a headache or other such nonsense.

Apart from being rude she just doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that no one was getting effected by us having a good time and if she joined in every once and a while then she might actually enjoy the class instead of whinge about it outside which she does with somewhat of an alacrity.

In 1939 just at the beginning of the Second World War the British Ministry of Information designed and printed 2,500,000 copies of the only recently rediscovered posters saying ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. The concept behind them was to create public moral in case of an invasion, and to this date there are only two original posters outside of government archives still intact. This famous message is very important when it comes to having a little bit of humour, I think. If you can’t have a laugh at yourself then for your own sake (and others) please just stay calm and carry on. It’s about time people just learnt that a large portion of humour is laughing at another person, whether it’s the person themselves or something they’ve done. If you can’t manage to do that then you are going to find yourself yelling at a group of people for having fun, and no one will appreciate that.

Just after handing in an assignment or report  that you will be assessed on comes the terrible, bone-chilling, ball breaking feeling of ‘did I do that bit right?’ and ‘what if they don’t like it?’. Some of you might have only had these thoughts come whizzing back to your recently or it might have been decades since it was apparent that you might fail (lucky you).But I for one don’t seem to of experienced these feelings much, or at all really, and how I avoid these feelings is what concerns me more than the result I will get back from the teacher. I just simply forget about it.
Now it might seem to you as a pretty good coping mechanism but for me I find it a problem. As it starts out as a good coping mechanism but it leaks into all that your life involves. I used to be able to remember people’s names and what they liked and disliked. Now I find it hard just to remember what class I have next without doubting myself. So i guess its not quite a lack of memory, sure, its more that once I’ve found what I’m looking for in the gigantic pink squishy thing we call a brain, I suddenly assume that what I’ve found is wrong, and to save face I just pull out something random and end up saving no face whatsoever.
I’ve always had a problem with doubting myself like this. When I was in grade four or five and the usual process of learning the timetables was in full swing. “One times one is one, one times two is two, one times three is three” and so on the tape recorder would recite to the class as the class recited back all in unison. However when it was time to recite these tables to the class, by ourselves, my mind would freeze. The answer would be sitting there but I just wouldn’t be able to spit it out because the thought of it being wrong and embarrassing myself in front of all my peers was just too much. Of course then I spat out a random answer and of course it was wrong and of course it being primary school, kids can be horrible to each other and I found it very difficult.
The term ‘Dry your eyes princess, have a cup of cement and harden the f#!k up’ comes to mind, but I’m not scarred by these events because the flip side of being doubtful of yourself is that allowing yourself to be ridiculed can help the healing process, if people agree with you then you instantly feel better, right? So if you’re doubtful of yourself, and people are ridiculing you, which in a way is agreeing with what you already think about yourself makes you feel pretty good. Kind of like two wrongs make a right, or do they? It sounds twisted and strangely psychotic but I seem to manage fine, he says with a twitching eye.All that matters is that you can’t really know whether or not your right until that last moment when you receive your marks back or you’re spitting out the wrong answer in class, and the people around you support your result no matter if it’s good or bad. Then and only then can you know if you were right to doubt yourself.