Essay about Thoreau Reflection

Submitted By RaquelSuarez
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Reflect and Realize
Sitting, watching, and thinking. Who am I in relation to the world? Often times I find myself caught up in the eyes of others. Constantly doing this for one person, that for another. Quite frankly I think I have allowed myself to be shaped by the views of society and by the expectations of what others want me to be. Daughter, student, friend, but what else is there to this girl? What other purpose do I have here? Do I make a significant impact? Sadly, I want to believe it is true that I have done great in the world and that if I died today I would be greatly remembered…but it is not so. For I live life in a constant routine which seems endless and unchanging. I wake up every morning and I put on a uniform, a uniform that I did not choose, but one which was chosen for me that I was told to wear. When I do choose what I want, is it honestly what I want, or is it impacted by the opinions of others? I love to think, to be analytical and ask the question “Why?” That is why I must propose the most important question on which I have reflected, what is the meaning of life? More simply stated, why am I and every other human being put on this earth in the first place?
Why did God put us here on this earth? There must be a concrete reason. There must be something greater than the reason that I go about my day to day routine. Life is about more than my Lululemon or my Starbucks; it is about more than my Apple products or my new car. Unfortunately as I reminisce upon the things I find important, it becomes apparent that they are all materialistic. I could go on and on about all the possessions I have in life and about my want for more. Then, I start to realize that to find myself; to answer the question of what life truly means I should consider what importance possessing all this stuff I have in life truly does for the betterment of my existence. Maybe connecting to my own life what Thoreau said, “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" (Thoreau 65). Like previously stated, I have let society impact the person I am, constantly worrying about what others think of the person I have become. I allowed society to tell me that possessing more was essential to making it big in life. Pondering, I started to sort out my own thoughts of essentials in life. I am alone, nobody around to tell me who to be or what to think, and being so, I let my mind begin to wander.
I might have everything in the world I could ask for, but does it fulfill my happiness? What does it mean to truly possess something? We as a society and most definitely I as an individual have the tendency to allow the desire to want something be the overriding emotion. When we desire to have something, we fight to own it until we can call it our own. But then what? Now we own it, and that desire that is now fulfilled loses its satisfaction. We now set out to find something else to desire to make ours, and quickly it becomes how we live our life. Always wanting bigger, better, and more, we forget the true beauty of what we possess as it just becomes another object in just another collection. As I allow the cool breeze, and the absolute beauty of the nature around me soak in, it registers in my mind that the human desire to possess everything we see is quite absurd. For in a quick glance I have owned the beauty of nature in my own eyes for a fleeting moment. I have figuratively owned this moment, but I did not need to possess it, or make it my own. It was an owning without possessing. Maybe this is what is more important in our hectic lives, a simple freedom of not needing
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