Andrew+J’s+Final+AmEx+2015+Speech


 * Title of Speech **
 * On John Muir, Junior year, trees, clouds, boxes, not to mention life in general**
 * Text of Speech **

“All that the sun shines on is beautiful so long as it is wild.” I probably wasted a solid minute on the History AP exam thinking about the meaning of this quote by John Muir in the short answer section. Muir was talking about Nature; that any and all landscapes were beautiful, but only if they were not yet tainted or trapped by civilization. But where does that leave us?

I suppose Arroyo Verde is fairly close, both in distance and meaning, but it’s rather small and getting smaller. I was up there a few days ago, climbing way in the back of the park, and to my surprise there was a shiny new chain-link fence blocking the way up to one of favorite spots in the park. Apparently the neighboring avocado growers took issue with people being even next to their orchard. Luckily you can still reach the spot the other way around. But the point is the small piece of the natural world already boxed in by fences is becoming more boxed.

Junior year was a load of boxes: I say boxes because throughout the year I saw basically two ways of surviving it; either with a crammed schedule planned down to the very minute or living day to day, scrambling to keep up with everything in the absence of planning. However we survived, we did, but chances are most of us had next to no spare time, and what time we did have went into some sort of vacuum (also known as Netflix). Not to say that the year was a bad experience – on the contrary, it was the best of any school year I’ve had – but it did, at least in my experience, become entirely composed of school, music, running, food, and sleep – in that order of importance. Not a bad mix of activities, but is there not more to life?

I guess what I’m getting at is that what if Muir’s quote can be looked at from a broader perspective? **__Life__** is beautiful so long at is wild. Free. Un-boxed life.

The world is large. The world is still large. It just seems small because we are able to travel so quickly. We can travel halfway around the world in less than a day, but that doesn’t get rid of all the places in between. I can drive to school in a few minutes and notice only the traffic jam and the clock in my dash board or I could walk and enjoy the trees. I want to see more people walking in America, more people who notice the in-between places, more people for whom the journey is as important as the destination. I don’t ever walk to school, so that makes me either hypocritical or just lazy. But honestly, when was the last time you took the time to notice something not noticed, perhaps the sky for instance. Clouds are entirely underrated pieces of art.

Junior year was overwhelmingly busy if not quite as death inducing as I’d been led to believe. But looking back, I could have at least wasted time more productively. Instead of listening to music in my room, zoning out, I could have been listening to music outside. I could have filled one of those empty sketch books I seem to be accumulating. I could have read a book, done some yoga or something, anything. Moving forward, I plan on doing a whole lot of nothing this summer, but doing it right.

Past this summer, college beckons from behind that last, thin span of time known as senior year. That future represents a whole new world of opportunities, and also a ton more work. But sometimes we forget we are living life right now, in this moment. Life does not begin at some unspecified later time, however much it might seem to. For there is always work to do. School work now, classwork in college, real work at work, and eventually you’re either retired or dead, which is just plain morbid. Retirement must be nice, but it’s rather sad if it’s the only end goal of a lifetime trajectory. “My goal is to finally not have to do anything.” wow. How sad. And anyway being old is a full-time job by itself. So live now, not later. Live later also, but only when you get there. Do things. Take time to not do other things, and notice the small things. To pull another quote out of a hat: “Between yesterday and tomorrow/ there is more, there is more than a day.” - Lyricist Alan Bergman

America has always been known as the land of the free and the brave. So be free; be brave in life, in thought. Yourself. The America I want to live in is a nation of individuals: individuals searching for truth all in their own ways and ending up at the same place anyway.

To close out this ramble of thought, I suppose it would be fitting to conclude with a final quote: By John Lennon “Imagine all the people/ living for today. You may say that I’m a dreamer/ but I’m not the only one. I hope someday that you will join us/ And the world will be as one” The History AP exam, and various people (cited above)
 * Cite your sources **