Ideas are our greatest weapons: Breathtaking ideas

Last year was quite a year for me. And let me tell you, it wasn´t one of my favorites. Last year was a lesson, and nothing more than that. Without it I wouldn´t be standing here, talking proudly about this... Last year I had an eating disorder, and I have overcome it.

Sometimes I think about it and look for the reason that caused me my inner struggles, and always get to the same conclusion, society and ideas.

Ideas are in fact our greatest weapons. Aren´t ideas responsible for causing wars and revolutions? Of course ideas have also created the perfection ideal that is imposed by the beliefs society holds. Let me explain myself, for girls it is really important to be like a Barbie, perfect, pretty and thin. But we ignore the fact that Barbies don’t have a heart or a brain and have a fixed smile, don´t they? For sure all of us here have gone through struggles at times, and they all started from an idea we were imposed to follow.

These are not ideas that I would label as positive. They are the opposite, they destroy and kill instead of inspiring, constructing…They can kill people´s own beliefs, they are imposed truths. 

In this 21^st century we are brainwashed by advertisements, models, and an idea of “perfection” which we seek to obtain until we either destroy ourselves, or we realize there is no such thing as perfection. 

Lauren King once said:

“There are two kinds of perfect: the one you can never achieve, and the other, by just being yourself” 

Breathtaking, isn´t it? 

We struggle in being someone else trying to fix ourselves when, in reality, we are not broken. In order of achieving “perfect” we have to be ourselves and nothing else than that.

The secret is in being strong enough not to follow the crowd because in the end you will eventually get lost in it.

 How many times a day before taking a decision do we take the time to think about it? And when I say “think about it”, I really mean it. Now, how many times do we decide to skip the “thinking part” because everybody else is doing the same and follow the crowd just like sheep? What we don´t know is that this part we are avoiding could mean a lot more than what we believe.

My favorite poem, which perfectly explains this, is by Robert Frost and it is called “The road not taken”. 

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. “

What is the point in taking a road if you aren´t comfortable in it? The number of people that do something certainly does not contribute in making their decision right. We are not sheep. We were given minds to differentiate between what is right from what is wrong. We were given vocal chords, a mouth, and the power to speak so as to use it, not to repeat what others said, but what you want to say. We should make those parts of our body worth it and use them as you we are supposed to. 

I don’t want to be a sheep; I have bigger plans for me than that, so I decided to make a change and follow my own ideas.

When C. Columbus thought that the world was round, everybody accused him as wrong. Everybody believed he was insane, but who turned out to be right? The insane individual who went against the stream, following and committing to his ideas.

So then, how can you follow our ideas and making them great? Three words, 17 letters, and a challenge: believe in yourself. Just like Dr. Seuss says:

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

Let’s not live in a world where we claim not being equal, when all of us follow the same shepherd. Let’s be our own shepherds, but whilst teaching others what thinking for yourself, and following our ideas really is, because in the end of the road…ideas are our greatest weapons.

Ideas are incredibly powerful, without them nothing would be possible. However, ideas need actions to compliment them. Action is achieved by the ability of figuring out which ideas we want to follow. It sounds simple but it is not an easy task at all. We need to be determined in what, how, and when we want things to be for us.

A single idea can change your whole day. If we all take time to reflect on the ideas that come into our heads, and choose which ones to follow, we can start a process that may change the world. Today, right now. Starting this very moment.

*silence*

Breathtaking, isn’t it?

By Lucia Miri Echavarria

Note: This was another ESSARP competition, but this time it was public speaking. I won 1st place for this competition which was based on writing a speech and delivering it based on the topic given by the ESU (English Speaking Union) this year which was "Ideas are our greatest weapons". I used some stuff that I had written before in other essays since they had so much to do! Actually I wrote this speech one day before the competition, so I was quite in a hurry...Hope you enjoy it! I will upload my video delivering the speech at the competition soon! :) 

Alone with myself

I’ve always looked, but never said a word. I’ve been always listening, but my mind spoke in a language that nobody would understand. This was the first time.

I used to be a very silent kid, usually everybody pointed out how shy I was. I used to isolate myself, not because I liked having no friends, but because nobody would ever understand me better than myself. Maybe it was the fear of what others would say, or of being wrong. It might have possibly been as well the fear of the “why” that comes after telling someone your reasons for something. I am afraid of questions and not being able to answer them, so I’ve been always better on my own. Of course this was all before “the big day”. The day in which I chose to do something I thought of without last minute regrets. It was that day which marked the rest of them and until now I don’t regret it at all.

I love watching people everywhere, I get sometimes very distracted and my teachers get mad at me. The point is that I see problems everywhere, they overwhelm me, but confidence never sees me. I have never had that little part of me; deep inside to tell me, “go for it” or “what if?” There are more than a hundred things that annoyed me and couldn’t stop. At least I write them all down in a notebook I always carry with me.

It was in that moment, when my pen stopped working. There was no more ink left since I wrote tons of things per day which scared me to react to. I had to be quick and silent so that nobody could hear my footsteps and realize I was there. Mum and dad were still fighting, they hadn’t gotten a clue I was there, but if it weren’t for those marvels on the floor, those tiny balls of glass. I fell. As my body hit the floor and grandma´s photograph fell from the night table beside me, all sound stopped. There was no more shouting, nothing but the noise of my breath. I closed my eyes and stood up. I walked to the door that separated my parents from me and took a deep breath. My hand, placed in the cold metal that would help me open the door. I felt as if I was frozen, my whole body immobilized

Somehow the door opened and mum peeped out to see if it was clear. A tension like a charge of electricity filled the room. I stuttered for a while, until I saw mum full of bruises. It hadn’t been the first time, but it made me lose my fear.

“What is wrong with you? What is it now? Is it that you forgot your reports from work today and you were told off and had a bad day and that’s why you go around blaming everybody except from you? Oh right! That was last week. Tell me dad, what is it today? Is it that you blame mum for getting pregnant again? I may look like a shy fourteen year old who doesn’t think too much, but believe me, I do. I am tired of noticing everybody´s problems and not being able to do anything, but after all though I know they should figure solutions out for themselves, I can´t keep their problems out of my mind! It isn’t my fault that because of my birth you broke economically! It wasn’t my fault that because our dog looks scary it scared Mrs. Honeymoon´s cat and that he escaped a week ago and doesn’t give a sign of coming back!  It isn’t my fault that because I think too much I cant sleep at nights, or that because whenever I see a problem I have to write it down ! or how the kitchen sink is broken and the sound of the drops falling makes me nervous so I cant be there!  And the worst thing of all is that I cannot even say a word about it because nobody would ever understand! What if I kill myself so that you debts aren’t that bad? Of course not, you would have to pay a funeral!  What if I tell Mrs. Honeymoon that our dog was the one who scared her cat, Mr. Pickles, who she´s been crying and worrying for, and that I do know that he´s not that far away from her place, he´s just scared to go down the tree he jumped on, which I can see right through my bedroom´s window, because of the water everywhere from the storm! She would hate me for knowing and not telling her! What about my teacher? If I told her that I can’t sleep well because I think too much at nights and that the only thing that keeps me awake is everything that surrounds me except for her class, would cause me to get a visit to the principal´s office! Or how can I explain you that the only reason of why I am here is that my pen´s ink, the one I use to write the problems I am afraid of confronting, run out and that my intention wasn´t to tell you all this but to get a new pen?” I said with my cheeks covered in fear. I took a deep breath. My parents were as pale as snow as if they had seen a ghost, so I continued.

“Nobody would understand me, right?” I said hoping for an answer. “Nobody would ever understand neither of my thoughts nor feelings, because nobody is aware of my existence” I left the room with a slam on the door and went to bed. That night I couldn´t sleep either. Thoughts conquered my mind. Words didn’t seem enough to explain what I felt, but what I didn´t know was that they did understand me, I wasn´t alone.

Mum and dad tried to give me more attention, only by asking me about my day, sending me to a psychologist, surrounding me by people who would only mumble words that made no sense to me or that didn’t seem relevant at all.

I was surrounded by tons of school partners as soon as my parents talked to the school about “my problem”. Anyway, nobody could understand me the way I did, and even though they were there I felt as if I was on my own.

Maybe someday someone will understand me, or I might end alone for my questions about everything, but I’d rather be alone with myself.

Lucia Miri Echavarria

Note: This was a narrative I wrote for an ESSARP Writing Competition on May 2012. The competition consisted in a two-hour period in which you were given different options so that you could pick what you were going to write about (I chose one that had to do with a door opening). I won 1st place in this competition and I am really happy about it, so I would love to share this.

Carpe Diem

Along with a new year comes a new way of living, or at least to me. A change has to be made in order for me to continue...

    

GATHER ye rose-buds while ye     may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles     to-day,
To-morrow will be dying.

This fragment from Robert´s Herrich "To the Virgins" can also be summarised into 2 words. Carpe diem. These two words are the Latin for "seize the day". Curiously, these words have been used in English since the early 1800s, but not most of us have really experienced what it really means.
Carpe diem is about taking chances, it is about believing that your own ideas can contribute to the world, and that every single day must be lived to its fullest. This powerful meaning is sometimes underestimated by us, I must painfully admit. We don´t understand life´s importance until we are about to lose it. We take for granted that we have a certain capability and that we will reach as high as our capability determines us to, but  what happens the most is that we tend not to know what our capability is. We all are destined to succeed, as long as we really want to and try to achieve it.
"You must strive to find your own voice. For the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it all."
We all are important parts of our world. We aren´t equal, that´s for sure, but we all have something that should tie us together with a bow, and that should be the desire to swim against the stream, going against all odds and our "capacities" as well.
Limitations might appear, but nobody has to ever stop you from doing what you really want to do and achieve in life.

“But only in their dreams can men truly be free. It was always thus and always thus will be.”

We are all free, but we appear to think that we live trapped. Those iron bars we see in front of us are nothing else than fear. Don´t stay there still, staring at them, they don´t bite. Touch them and feel how transpasable they are. I wrote this poem some days ago.

Carpe Diem

There is nothing more conquerable than life itself,
just wish for it and seize the day,
you will in fact find your way,
to that endless journey you have always strived to make.  

Do never stop and bear in mind,
life´s roads will diverge once and again get intertwined,  

with your soul and with your heart.

Thus fly away and depart
to what destiny has for you set apart
Hence do not be late
for the break of day.

- Lucia Miri Echavarria

Here I have attached a fragment of a poem which is about life.  Life has its ups and downs, but we must go through them to succeed in it.

Walt Whitman´s O Me! O Life!?

"O me, O life?Answer.That you are here--that life exists and identity,That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."

"What will your verse be?" -The Dead's Poet Society

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

The Dangers Of Conformity

Conformity: The difficulty to maintain your own beliefs amongst others.

“Humanity’s most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

How many times a day before doing something or taking a decision, do you take the time to think about it ? And when I say "think about it" I really mean it. I mean thinking about yourself, what you believe is right and wrong. Now, how many times do you skip that step because everybody else is doing the same?

I once read: "Do not follow the crowd. You might get lost in it"
What is the point of taking that road if you aren´t comfortable in it? The number of people that do something does certainly not contribute to making their decision right. When C. Columbus believed that the world was round everybody accused him as wrong. Everybody believed he was wrong, and who turned out to be right? The individual who went against the stream.

We are not sheep. We were given minds to differentiate what is right from what is wrong. We were given vocal chords, a mouth, and the power to speak so as to use it, not repeating what others said, but what you want to say. So what about making those parts of our body worth it and using them as we are supposed to?
Frost once said " Two roads diverged in a wood and I took the less traveled by, and it has made all the difference."I am not asking you to kill somebody, that is a good type of conformity. I am encouraging you to think for yourselves, you are not just an individual in the world. Make yourself remembered. Lets not live in a world where we claim not being equal, when all of us follow the same shepherd. Lets be our own shepherds, but whilst teaching others what thinking for yourself really is...

“As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing it, So, students, should you accept my words – after testing them, and not merely out of respect.” – the Buddha


By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

Learned Helplessness

Learned Helplessness is a phenomenon easily found in both academics, and social scenes. This phenomenon is caused when someone fails at something once, he tends to apply that to every single thing that he does in the future, causing him to feel often frustrated, stupid, useless, etc. 

When I start thinking about this I picture myself sometimes, I can remember moments for example during my mathematics classes. Watching my classmates saying that they couldn’t understand the tenth point, when I was still struggling with the first one. Since then I labeled myself as a girl who will always fail at math, someone who would never be able to solve an equation. It is really hard when you feel that...feeling useless, but after one of my teachers saw me giving up so much on every task, she told me to try once again but harder. It was quite incoherent to me since everyone was so fast at solving them and I had to spend a lot of time on them, but I did just as she told me to, and I solved it.

What is really amazing is that I would have never tried again if my teacher would have not pushed me through it.However I still have lots of trouble since I am very used to feeling as failure at my math class, but now I don't give up. Maybe we all need someone to help us do some things, and we might as well need to stop putting labels on ourselves as failures, useless , stupid, etc. These can really block our way to succeeding and achieving tons of things. We can’t just stand there without moving, watching how this goes by us…

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning how to dance under the rain”

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

A world of comments and critics

Not every once in a while we get the chance to open our eyes. Lets face it, we all make mistakes. We all judged someone. We are not perfect, but we can change.

Human dignity is something that, in my opinion, is nowadays lost. Racism, prejudices, judgments, and much more are taking over our lives. Why do we allow this to happen? Do we feel insecure of ourselves that we have to criticise others?

Bullies. That was a famous word during my years in primary and sadly it is quite popular actually. I used to come back from school crying because people were mean to me. They enjoyed making people suffer, and the worst part…children didn’t stand up for themselves, me being one of them. We are afraid.

It is a world of comments and critics. Everything is about doing what is well seen, about pleasing people. Why? Today we only want to fit in everywhere. We don’t want to feel the shame of sitting on our own in the bus, to work without partner; while everybody has one…We need acceptance, and it seems that we are capable of changing our personality just for a bit of it.

Tolerance:  The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.

That is a definition everybody should know. We should all be tolerant. We don’t have to like everybody, just tolerate them.

I am different, and people laughed at me because of that, but how to overcome them is not trying to make them good people, it is understanding that being different is what  makes you being yourself...And we actually are supposed to be different.

"You laugh at me because I'm different; I laugh at you because you're all the same."

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria (age 12)

Values

For a long time, humans have searched for a life that lasts forever, but every time it lasts even less…Living forever is far away from our reach now. Life works with money now, not happiness, and not very much with health... The poorer die young and the wealthy die, but already when they are old enough to. Isn't it quite unfair? It might be unfair, but the important question is...Do we ever ask ourselves why this is so?  Why do we allow this to keep working like this?

When I was younger, maybe between ages 6 to 10, I used to give tons of things to charity, even though I still do, it is not the same. Before I was a lot more enthusiastic about it, but now other interests have conquered my mind. Maybe this is the time when young adults start changing their minds and start becoming outsiders of the matter (or maybe not) as soon as they grow up. I was taught really well by my parents, but recently a lot more by my mother, but although she still tries hard for me to focus on my values, she fails constantly. Now you may wonder, so if this girl knows her mum tries hard for her to focus on her values, why doesn’t she try harder? That is exactly my point, from this age forward, we lose values so badly it is really hard to go back, just like smoking; you know it is bad for you but it isn’t really easy to quit. So, going back to my point, I believe that if our society doesn’t have teenagers with values, good habits, and good manners, when they grow up into adults they won’t be really different, and might be worse. We are the future, we have the power of a better generation in our hands.

I happen to be one of those who still remain, and I am proud to say it, with most of them.  I am lazy to tidy up my room, to gather all my old clothes in a bag and take to the church for the holiday seasons, but I still do it.  

I believe I was talking about something else before...my original point, “the poorer die young and the wealthy die old”. Now it is all about money. Money is everywhere we go; our world is spins around it...I would rather say that our planet rotates around a golden coin instead of a star...What is worse is that I feel as if I was completely alone, as if nobody understood how important this matter has become. When it comes to debating in class about the poor people and how we can help my classmates just joke around and distract because, of course, they are not interested, it is none of their business. Some of them would really want to participate but if they do they might be exposed to social suicide (another interesting term which we might talk about later), just for participating.  I would say that they don’t have an idea of what life is about and what is happening in the world they live in. Considering my age I believe I am a fortunate girl because of knowing a bit and being grateful about it. So, my classmates aren’t that grateful for their amazing education at the school I go to, and commit lots of vandalising  That reminds me of one of the teachers telling us that kids at public schools, the ones that aren’t that good, care for what they do have a lot, because they know what it is like to be in lack of lots of material you need for school for example.  This made me so upset and got me thinking so much at that time (though I still do frequently).  What if we switched schools? I bet they wouldn’t make it to a day in there, and the other kids who would be in our school would have loved it. I would love all those people who are so selfish  to live one day as a person who doesn’t have anything at all. Would they manage? Would they survive?  I wonder what that would really be like.

Some of my friends if I ever talk about this just say, you have your own computer, a mobile phone, an iPod, a camera, you have no right to say that, but I earned those things, I bought them with my own money, or they were gifts for my school performance throughout the years. I am still really humble about what I have, and I am really grateful for everything I get, and for every single detail that my parents add to my life.  Just because I have a lot doesn’t mean I don’t know how to care for it, and be thankful for it. I was brought up as a Christian so I really know about that, and still keep everything I learned from that with me though I am not Christian anymore.

Sometimes I wonder why is our world constantly worried about money? Why do they think about it so much? Is it that terrible being an adult? Or is it just that they can’t find their path to the right decisions sometimes?

People sometimes are so involved in money issues that they end up being really mean, self-centered, selfish, ignorant, etc. Money really does change people, although we can’t stop using it I would love to live the moment instead of worrying about how much will living the moment cost.

Am I the only one getting tired?

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria (age 13)

Note: I generalized quite much in this essay, I don't mean that everybody loses their values, I was 13 when I wrote this and I didn't want to change much of it! Hope it is okay! :)