No one truly knows when it will be their time to leave this earth сertainly, it is important to acknowledge the fact that life is sacred, however, death is inevitable and this life is only temporary. In understanding this, I have found great importance in living every single day to my fullest potential. Each individual only has one life to live, so why not wake up every morning with the intent to fulfill every personal goal that we may have? Most importantly, we should strive to live a life of virtue that impacts those around us at any moment, our lives could be taken from us, but at what point do we truly start living? First, I want to start off by sharing what has been two of my greatest fears. The first of the two is living a life that is less than extraordinary I have this incredibly irrational fear of growing old where I am nearing my death and just thinking back to the things that I have missed out on. For example, the situations where I could have done something great but I did not, or I where held back because I was simply too timid, nervous, or self-conscious and insecure.
Basically, just living a life where I did not allow myself to go the extra mile and chase after everything that I wanted in life. That is one of my very biggest fears my second greatest fear has been living a life that unveils too much of who I am deep down inside to people who do not truly value my worth. For such a long period of my life I allowed this fear to absolutely consume my entire life I lived in a way that was very secretive and reserved because I feared that someone unworthy of my heart and soul would grab a hold of it and destroy what I considered to be so finely and precisely crafted. In my mind, my actions seemed rational and common amongst other individuals as well. But as I grew older, I began to acquire a more open-minded thought process, and I then realized just how unhealthy this second fear of mine truly was I feel like in the twenty-first century, as a millennial, I have tended to have this instinct that desires to correct all of my flaws and just cover up absolutely everything that might set me apart.
Although this may not be the full intention of my heart, my second greatest fear has heavily dictated some of the choices that l have made for myself. It has caused me to desire to make myself either look perfect or just to look normal like everyone else to simply blend in with the crowd and fall into the common route of conformity. I would often times make it a goal to not allow those around me to see the nasty things and hard times in my life I thought that by keeping these things to myself, I would become stronger and overcome every hurt and inner burden. The people that I knew would only see the bits and pieces of my life that I considered to be front-stage material; the parts of my life that I had under control. Let me just say, I have thoroughly discovered and I am still learning that this is not how life works in a process of seeking validation from those around you and trying so hard not to let other people down, you will crush yourself and ultimately let yourself down.
The most substantial turning point that I can vividly recall was with one of my closest friends I met this girl who was a few years younger than me back in the fall of 2012. We got along just fine, but our age difference made it difficult for me to really connect with her I could tell that she wanted so deeply to become closer friends with me, but she was only thirteen at the time and I was in high school, with a job, and completely different interests than she had. She reminded me a lot of myself, but just the thirteen-year-old version of me, which I was slowly transitioning away from. What was most difficult was that my parents continuously told me that they could see how much she looked up to me and that it was a great opportunity for me to be a positive example for her. This affected me emotionally because I knew that since we did not really have a close friendship, she only saw my front-stage, and therefore portrayed me as someone with very few flaws.
I felt tremendously guilty, because although I felt safe behind the walls I put up all around me, I knew that I was not allowing people to truly get to know who I was I was absolutely terrified that people would not like me if they saw my flaws. Over the next couple of years, our friendship bloomed as I chose to be more open with who I was and the mistakes I made. Not only did this build an incredible friendship between the two of us, but it revealed the benefits of being secure in who you are and having the confidence to share that with those around your Human beings are such internal species and we have the ability, unlike other species, to lock things inside of us, bottle things up and not tell people what is truly going on with us. This is kind of a luxury in some cases, because if you are ever going through a hard time and you do not want people to know about it, it is relatively easy to do so.
But in other cases it is unhealthy because a lot of times it is perfectly necessary to purge nasty and unwanted parts of your life, rather than hiding and allowing those things to overtake you. lam currently twenty years and six months into my life, I am at an age where most of my friends are either in college, getting married, or some are even beginning to have children I have reached a stage that requires much responsibility and self-dependency. Like most young women my age, I am indecisive, I tend to overanalyze every possible situation that I face, but I seek every day as an opportunity to learn, to grow, and sometimes face my fears, even if they seem life-threatening, I hunger for truth and this is a characteristic that I have manifested from a very young age, so gaining knowledge and understanding is something that excites me, because it represents growth and maturity. For the longest time in my life I experienced an “I don’t know” period in my life, which is was pretty hard for me to explain, because upon being asked about this phase, my response would be, “well, I don’t know.”
It is basically one of those phases in your life where you do not have a solid answer for anything you do not really know how you are feeling or what you would like to do with your life. You just do not really know much of anything, for that matter. During this time period, I just felt so lost, because I did not have answers to questions that I wanted to know personally and I surely did not have answers to questions that others would ask me concerning plans for my future. This was a really scary place for me to be, because I was constantly fearful of letting important figures in my life down I feel like this is a very common phase for young women my age, but we are often told that we are not allowed to feel this way. Society tells us that there is just no time for these phases of confusion and we have to power through all of it we have to continue on in the common cycle that is expected of us and we are not allowed to have those feelings and experience those “I don’t know” phases.
The world will not stop for anyone we cannot ask it to pause for a second while we get our acts together. No, it does not grant a single soul the luxury of having a second to really breathe the world wants us to disregard this phase and just fake it. In the midst of all of this chaos, it is important to be vulnerable and take leaps of faith, spending your entire existence going through common motions and living up to this standard that society has made us all think is the correct way to live, never truly gives us the freedom to live out our lives in such a way that is powerfully unique and individual. Our phases of uncertainty, hardship, and doubt only teach us lessons to overcome bigger obstacles in our lives 50 through my recent development and knowledge, I now choose to live by a philosophy that allows me to live in such a way where all of my thoughts are a hundred percent my own and not what I simply borrow from society. A philosophy that is hungry for truth, reaches for the highest and forces me to question the ways I have been taught and what I have always believed.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a great German philosopher writes in The Gay Science, “What is the seal of liberation? No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.” Society often makes us believe that it is most important to have the very best of materialistic things and to be better than all those around us. During this ongoing battle to superiority, we tend to lose sight of who we are, what we want as individuals, and how we should truly live. We must be secure in who we are and have a clear personal understanding so that external sources will not easily persuade and influence us this new philosophy that I have adopted over the years has helped me overcome my first fear. The fear that someday when I am old and gray, I will reflect on the life that I have lived and an overwhelming sense of regret and disappointment will fall upon me, a fear that I will never truly reach my full potential. This life philosophy has enabled me to thrive off of my personal thoughts, feelings, and goals.
The values and morals that I hold deep inside are parts of who I am that I need to share with those around me. If live every day of my life in fear of going forth and taking vulnerable chances or hiding who I am, what will I be contributing to something so sacred as life on this earth? Over the past couple of months, I have been given an opportunity to delve deeper into what it truly means to live a virtuous life. I have studied multiple different perspectives of the purpose and meaning of life on earth and specific qualities that one must consider obtaining in order to fulfill this purpose. Along with learning a great deal from various philosophers, I was able to collect various viewpoints that I personally agreed with and selected ones that stood out to me the most. Although I am not perfect, I like to think of these views as a simple recipe for how I want to live my life and how I know that I should live I like to compare this to the knowledge of health and nutrition.
One may be presented with a plethora of nutritional facts and studies that clearly proves the importance in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. But once they have all of this knowledge, it is up to them to actively live it out. It is much easier said than done and they are bound to fall short and occasionally fail, but if living a long healthy life is important to them, they will sacrifice what they need in order to achieve this lifestyle. This correlates well with my philosophy that helped me overcome my biggest fears and granted me the desire to live a truly virtuous life that impacts those who I come in contact with. Though I have molded my philosophical views to fit well with various morals and beliefs that l have held close to my heart for quite some time, these views essentially derived from Aristotle‘s ethics of living a virtuous life I believe Aristotle to be one of the most rationally influential greek philosophers and scientists of ancient Greece.
Everything that he educated his followers on branched off of one simple ideology, “happiness depends on ourselves.” Although Aristotle may not have preached based off of biblical teachings, in a way, he imitated a lot of instructions on how one should live purely that are in the word of God. In the book I of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he begins by analyzing that all human activities primarily aim at being good. He would say that human action will always seek an end. In other words, every pursuit that we have as humans is for the sake of some end goal or purpose this end goal is ultimately referred to as the telos. This is quite compelling, because we perform certain actions that are intentional by choice, such as going to college. We go to college for the purpose of attaining a higher education that will grant us the ability to work in a specific field.
But there are other human actions such as breathing or blinking that are also human actions that serve a purpose, but that are not chosen, they just occur naturally. He says that these ends (telos) of our human actions are ends because they are, in fact, good Aristotle has different descriptions of what would make something appear as the ultimate telos for us. Like why would we call something good and seek it in human action? These determining factors include the usefulness or pleasure of the telos but upon reflecting on Aristotle’s views of determining what it means to live a meaningful life full of virtue, I have come to my own conclusion for my life and how I should live I believe that in order to fulfill the ultimate telos, one should live for truth. Rather than shielding oneself to what is true and living a life of deception, one must be accountable for what they know to be rightfully just. How then can we determine what is right and what is wrong? In this day and age, society is faced with a surplus of sources that tell us what we should do and how we should think, and so many have lost sight of how to truly think for themselves.
Whether this flows from a religious perspective or a common cultural perspective, it is based primarily on morality. Morality is the principles in which a community lives by rights and wrongs but throughout the years, from ancient philosophers, all of the ways until modern culture, humans have been desensitized to what is good and full of truth. Who is to say what is right and what is wrong? The real issue lies within modern day morality. The standards of society over time have decreased substantially and they continue to do so as humans begin to become less and less remorseful of human actions. Life simply cannot work without values and ethics that bring structure the true dilemma is determining whose ethics are right and whose are wrong.
Who is to say what is right and wrong when members of a society cannot agree upon what is purely true? There is no unity and people choose blindness to the truth, rather than critically thinking for themselves just as the analogy I made about a person being presented with facts that prove the benefits of maintaining good nutrition, it is now my turn to choose whether or not I would like to live my life according to these thought-provoking experiences I have had and the facts and testimonies that l have been presented with. I want to live a life of virtue that impacts those around me, therefore I must put effort into reaching my fullest potential. I desire to find truth in all aspects of my life, so i must first be truthful with those around me. I have the recipe to an impactful life of virtue and truth, but now it is my responsibility to follow the recipe, “the greatest virtues are those that are most useful to other persons.”
