Gabby+C’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

My mom and step mom make a menu each week, planning exactly what is for dinner, each day, every week. A seemingly great plan to smart consuming, but I honestly I can’t stand it. When friends come over and exclaim how smart and cool it is to have such well thought out meals, I can’t help but hate it. I should be grateful to it, but it reminds me how my mom and stepmom are using routine and habits to ignore real life and their real feelings, and it brings them no joy. They and we have all fallen to the dark cycles of routine, instead of taking life by the horns and really experiencing this life on earth, finding joy even in the average things. Our daily grind is consuming our lives. Sleep, school, homework, eat, sleep, school, homework, eat. And it just develops one day into sleep, work, kids, eat, sleep, and repeat and repeat. We are all victims of the slow killing cycle once we refuse to find joy in our lives. I believe we have lost the sense of adventure. Quests are a little hard to come by, but why do our only adventures now lie in new drugs or alcohol? We don’t have to be heroes but who said we can’t be the trailblazers or pioneers of our generation? And I want to call us to this in a different way: I don’t solely mean someone who is brave enough to break the mundane rhythm of everyday life with ditching school for some ferris bueller's day off or leaving society to live off the natural land in the jungles of remote Montuo China. If that is the way you must determine to live life to the fullest and not in constant mindless doldrums, then I say power to you. But the real bravery comes with being courageous enough to break this tiresome schedule, not by making drastic changes to it, but by being willing to find the purpose and pleasures in it. We all have to play the game of life to get where we wanna go, especially with going to school. If we can’t stop going to school, then why not make it something worth living for? **School will be purposeful because I’m moving towards my calling and I will learn and I will reach out to people I might have never had the chance to without school. Where else can I go to have crappy inspirational speeches or see Storm aka Storm?** I’m guilty of falling into the I hate school, I wish high school was over, and I’m just gonna power through and not enjoy it routine. But what kind of life is that? Our lives are the doldrums of stagnant thought, just rushing to get through it to something better. But what for? The better life you’re racing towards, will always have more troubles and the unavoidable tasks of life, like school is now. I’d challenge you to be the ones to find joy in Math class or having a conversation with a new classmate, instead of putting your head down and charging through life because you have somewhere better to be. Because the truth is, you don’t, because you are here. You’re here for a reason and why not dare to live in the present and find purpose in every single day, when it could only bring value and blessing into your life? By no means is this an easy task. And somedays we literally just cannot deal. On those days, why do we still drain ourselves dry just trying to “get through the day”? If we are going seek to find the purpose in everyday and those days we are beat the core and cannot find the joy-- I’d call you to be adventurers on those days to “get through the day”. I’d call you to take a risk, no matter how small. When we refuse to ever break the cycle, we’re just simmering to explode. I’d pray that we would allow the little air bubbles to release here and there; an unexpected trip to San fran this weekend, helping out a friend right away when they call you up even though it doesn’t fit your schedule to go see them, or even a hike after school. Instead of unleashing all of this pent up exhaustion and aggravation at once and doing something drastic and worth regretting. The same way you might regret not taking little moments to break out “the matrix”. And if you are one to refuse to break it yourself, life will find a way to make it happen. Next time your car breaks down, maybe send out a praise instead a protest because it has taken you out of the sleepy walk that is your day. I think we are so scared to take ourselves out of the tunnel vision of our plans and schedules. We are absolutely terrified to smash open the contents of our lives and look inside. Because then we might have to realize how much we do loathe what we have made life. And I don’t mean what we have to do in life, but what we have made it. If you look on your life and seriously hate what you do everyday, you’ve made it so dreadful on your own. I do believe it is a matter of choice. Our minds are powerful: we can convince ourselves to hate everything we have to do that isn’t directly serving to ourselves. Or we can use it to find triumph and bliss and delight and glee, even if we are just walking the dog or writing a speech. It’s true that we can’t all be Henry David Thoreau and toss of society for a cabin in the woods or the traveling hermit, neither which would have to deal with what we believe is an average boring life. What we may believe we have now, stuck in high school or in a career. Yet, there’s something better than dreading waking up and mindlessly meandering through our lives. Better than living for the weekend, when the weekend just becomes routine too. Routine will be normal and we do have schedules to follow like a functional person of society, but when we are so uptight and wound up, that when anything remotely off key of our plans happens, and we almost have a tantrum, one day we are gonna just snap completely. I’m pleading that we wouldn’t let plans and habits run our lives. If we must live in habits, there must be a way to choose joy in them over miserable slavery to our own plans. Fight for your silver linings! I try to take something from fictional character Bilbo Baggins, whose story is literally called the unexpected journey. It wasn’t always wonderful and it was harder than his cushy life in the shire, but his choice to go with the dwarves would change his life in ways he never imagined, as well as the lives around him. He almost stayed home, based on the fact that he wouldn’t have any idea what tomorrow held or what would happen to his material belongings or if he would ever come home. In my inevitable aging in America, i’d call us to be the kind of people to wake up our communities of friends and family and shake things up! Don’t let yourselves become the people who plan on eating pasta every tuesday. Why are you living for tomorrows dinner?? Live for today; for now. Be present in every moment, every conversation, every episode of friends you watch. And if you’ve gone numb to those, then it’s time to change something. It’s time for you to accept that life will be your unexpected journey and time to actually start experiencing it; not a numb and desensitized existence where you just follow preset plans without second thought like a zombie, never being fully present with others because you have more plans to get to. When you continue to plan out a life full of days that you truthfully do not have control over, you’re living everywhere but the present. Dare to let life take you on, being led on new paths you could have never dreamed. I’m proud of my mom for deciding to sell our house and move around the world with my stepmoms job once I’m in college because the opportunity presented itself. I hope she goes through with it. Dare to take an adventure from your monotonous habits and the way you go about them. Dare to love something as simple as writing blogs or feeding your cats because joy is hiding in every task, and this life can be beautiful if you seek it. I want to be your call to action, of the hero’s journey, even if your action is just smiling because you’re here today or taking time to notice the little pleasures like the sunlight streaming through the damn trees. “Be willing to take the first step, no matter how small it is. Concentrate on the fact that you are willing to learn. Absolute miracles will happen.” Louise Hay And If you need to scream from the rooftops every once in awhile to wake yourself from the mind-numbing routines, you know where to find me. I’ll join you.