All seniors at my high school are required to write a ‘meditation’, which is a lengthy, reflective personal essay. In the spring term, a committee picks a handful of the best ones to be read aloud to the school each Thursday. The ones that usually get picked are typically from students who overcame some incredibly emotional and dramatic personal challenge (such as: coming from a low income household in a third world country and ending up at one of the most elite prep schools in the US, overcoming the challenges associated with being transgendered, etc).
My meditation was titled (a little pompously) “On Change, Immutability, and Perception” and turned out to be a collage of seemingly random images and scenes that when combined should have lead the reader to wonder, “Does anything ever change? Do things ever stay the same?” I jumped from describing the time my dad and I launched a model rocket when I was little to a photograph I once saw to a time when I was at a Rite-Aid late at night and the only other person there was a man with one arm. But one of my favorite images in my meditation was when I described the lights on the telephone wires driving home from school. This was the big finale, the moment when all the pieces were supposed to come together. There was one hill that was perfectly angled so cars approaching from the top of the hill at night cast their headlights onto the telephone wires, and the light would move towards me as I drove up the hill. Just when the lights on the wires got close, suddenly the other car always came over the hill and I would be temporarily blinded by the intensity of their high beams. I hoped that the informed reader would come across this final passage and exclaim, “Ha! Things are always changing, but also stay the same—it just depends on your perception!” But in reality, it was pretty hard to come to that specific conclusion.
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