Imagine yourself enveloped in darkness. All is silent except the unremittant beat of a strange thumping sound that fascinates you as it plays upon your eardrums. It's your heartbeat throbbing against your flesh as your heart contracts and expands sucking in blood, the fuel of life, then thrusting it outward sending it pulsing and surging throughout your body in full vibrancy. Suddenly, you feel yourself moving. Like the blood, at one end you're being pushed while the other end is pulling. After an overwhelming rush, a deafening silence breaks as you find yourself immersed in a blinding light and feel yourself being lifted upward. Life, the precious gift given to us all, has its full realization at that moment of birth when we emerge as separate beings. This golden moment marks the beginning of our existence and the beginning of our journey along the path set out before us. At times the road is smooth when things are going great and you are filled with an exhilarating joy. You think it should always be this way with everything perfect. Then there are times when the road gets rough as the shackles of pain weigh heavily upon you and you feel you can no longer bear life's toil. Darkness descends again wrapping around you as it sweeps you off to another place. You're standing in a bedroom lit only by a gleam of light from the moon shimmering through the curtains. The air is still and all are asleep throughout the house except for one. A young girl lies upon the bed next to you with her face buried in her pillow. She seems deeply troubled, and her body shakes as tears stream from her eyes. She is pained by a deep frustration for she's been trying to understand herself, who she is, and why she's here, but she's lost inside herself haunted by fear and loneliness. She feels her spirit is trapped within and she longs for it to be free. All she sees is the darkness as she searches for the light. Life is more than merely existing. It's being alive with doing and empowered with thinking. It's feeling deep emotions like love, joy, and pain. It's allowing yourself to dream and being aware of who you are. Many people search for the meaning of life. They spend their lives contemplating what their purpose is in it and look everywhere for it. They search in things, in places, and in other people not realizing that the place to look is within one's self. The child in darkness is now on her knees with her head bowed before her. She looks to her heart asking why does life trouble her so? She wants to know who she is and longs to understand. The room becomes illuminated with a great light and an even greater light descends upon it. It surrounds her lifting her up off the ground. A vision of a tree stands before her and blood begins trickling down its limbs. She is reminded of a great suffering when the ultimate sacrifice was made. Suddenly, she feels herself plunged in water and, as she's pulled back up, the light begins to shine even brighter. Her eyes are now fully opened. The light flashes forward and you're in another room now. The light reflects off the stark white walls and in the center lies a bed. Another girl lies upon it with machines and tubes all around her. Your vision becomes cloudy until you see nothing but complete darkness again. You can hear the sound of a heartbeat only it seems to be fading. The darkness becomes pitch black and your skin chills as something passes through it. A light then breaks from a distance and you experience a warm feeling as it ascends back up into the air. Your vision becomes clear again and you see the girl lying before you. The sinusoidal waves of the heart monitor become a straight line as she takes her last breath. Life is so brief so one should take full advantage of it, though not necessarily by doing all you can do or being all you can be, but seeking enlightenment and getting to know who you are. Life's flame does not begin to fully burn until one becomes in touch with one's true self. Now you are falling uncontrollably into a dark void and some sort of gravitational force seems to be pulling you toward it. As you seem to be getting close to the end your fall halts, and you begin floating slowly downward. you land in yet another room only this one seems more familiar. It is bare except for what appears to be a small altar placed in the center. On it sits a stand in which a single candle stands erect. As you kneel to get a closer look you notice a small inscription on its surface. It reads:
"Don't be afraid of who you are. Go ahead. Light the candle. Shine."
NOTES:
I wrote this as a speech for my senior talk in high school. The talks gave us a chance to share a little bit of knowledge, experience, and advice with the student body. My main concern with mine was to make it unique. It's kind of unavoidable that when you have so many of these speeches and esp. when you've heard about 100 given each year for six years that most start to sound the same. I had observed the patterns that they tend to follow and though each person brings something unique about themselves to it, I wanted to do something new. Not that I'm special(soo not), but I had this thing where I didn't like following the norm or whatever. This would both help and weaken my speech. I had like many others dreamt about what I would say over the years. When my senior year came I had decided to make it like a meditative journey (i had been listening to too many meditation tapes). I thought this would help the purpose of the speech, because rather than stating what I had learn or whatever, I could describe it in a way that the listener could be taken through the experience and maybe feel it for themselves. This was a good concept. I don't know if my speech work 100% in that aspect, though. I had also wanted to avoid cliche terminology when talking about life's lessons and how life should be lived, but given that although I had started on the speech a year before it was finished until, um, the night before (yes, that was bad) the cliches found their way in. In the future I plan to rewrite this so that I won't cringe when I read it. But there are points I still like about it as it is now.
Okay, now for the explanation. This was lacking in the speech also. Those who knew me would have known exactly who the figures represented, but those who didn't might not of. I hope this didn't limit anyone's understanding of the speech. I didn't want to directly refer to myself. I wanted to kind of abtract it so it could be anybody. Making like a meditative journey and using "you" would work to do this, but it could have been edited more because at some points it's still weak. Anyway, the first section about the birth was the first part written (and remain the only part written for some time, because I kept rewriting it). I have this thing where I can't finish writing something unless the introduction or opening is 100% perfect. I thought it as appropiated the beginning should describe the moment of birth. I was using this to introduce the light/dark theme found in the speech and to parallel it to being reborn spiritually. It works on other levels, too.
Another thing that I hadn't notice while (speed) writing the rest of the speech was that I was describing each destination traveled as a room. This has some significance I'll try to figure out later, but someone commented about the rooms to me and I was like what rooms. It was kind of funny. But anyway, the first room is my room and the girl crying is me. I spent many of my early years as a child suffering from depression, though I didn't know it then. The sadness would ritually hit at night after I had said my prayers in which i would start to reflect on all the awkward moments of the day and crazy thoughts would enter in which I would be tearing myself apart. Everyone else in my house would be out like a light, but I always had problems sleeping. I would do this almost every night and then cry myself to sleep.
The next section comes back to the girl, but at a more uplifting moment. I wanted to describe the experience of spiritual rebirth, but not specifically refer to Christian terminology (although I end up doing that). I wanted it to be able to translate across the board and also be more descriptive of a general type of awakening you get when you become focussed as to what the situation meant that you just came out of and what it or life's greater purpose is.
The next room is, of course, in a hospital and the girl is my sister, Annie. She was diagnosed with luekemia at age 14 and died a couple months after. I was in the 10th grade at the time. She had been on life support, but it was her wish that if there was no progress she didn't want to remain on it for long. My sister showed a lot of courage during her battle and she underwent a sort transformation that would inspire me and help me when dealing with her passing. As at the beginning where I describe the moment of birth, I thought it would be best to bring it full circle and describe the moment of death. My brother and I had spent the summer with my sister at St. Judes Hopital in Memphis. It was in December when she died, so we were back at home for school. My mom was with her and I tried to imagine what that must have been like. Because of my physical separation, it was hard to imagine my sister not being here when my brother and I was first told. There's a protective shield that comes over you when you receive news like that. It wasn't until we viewed the body before the funeral that it really hit me as I stared at a lifeless shell.
The final room isn't a physical room like the others. However, the others mostly centered aorund the body as in the beginning. Now it goes back to the body and the room is symbolic of the soul. The topic of my speech self discovery. I had done a drawing two years before that was about a general discovery of knowledge. The image discribe in this paragraph is of that drawing. There was a solitary candle sitting on the edge of a table in a dark room that was made to look like a basement of sorts. A door had been open so a little light had crept in. The image is supposed to be suggective that whoever opened the door will enter and light the candle, thereby lighting the room.
I was really proud of the last lines. It was my message. One that I was suggesting to myself as well as to others.