Anson+T’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

=A Diamond is Temporary, Death is Forever=

You are going to die. And you will be gone, and that's a fact you’ll have to face whether you want to or not. But a fact that nobody should have to face is whether you leave this world fulfilled and content, or rolling in your own grave wishing you had done something different. So why would anybody want to live in a world where that seems to be the case for everybody.

I’m not sure what I expected to find picking up a rock, it wasn’t anything of significant worth, it wasn’t more eye catching than the ones around it, it was simply an entity of earth’s hardened magma. However the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Rocks are and appear to be permanent.

Of course I know that they aren’t, they’re constantly shaped by their surroundings. Mountains move up and down, canyons and valleys are slowly cut deeper, but take a second to listen to me. On the scale of a human lifetime they are, and it’s not like people haven’t realized this fact for millennia before our time, and for this reason I see them as important to us. A diamond is forever, is it not. We build our monuments out of this substance, and our modern infrastructure is nothing more than human ingenuity refining the substance. We do this because this insures that they will last generations past our own lifetime, rocks thus are then practical and symbolic. We seek to see ourselves in this material, yes we as a race seek to see ourselves in rock. We carve our heroes in stone because we want them to last, we want them to last forever, and in a way we seek this sort of permanence in ourselves too.

Is it not your desire to leave your initials in the wet pavement, scratch your name on a stone, or secure a lock to a bridge, and in this way we attempt to push our mortality our impermanence out of our minds. The monuments, the structures, all of that, gives us a peace of mind that this is the way that it will be and will always be. Just how the stars were once seen. Unchanging.

We want to believe that some part of us, any part of us will last the test of time, but then what do you come to when you see that rocks aren’t as permanent as they appear, this therefore leads to our own demise, our own death.

However, what is the closest that you can come to imagining death, picturing everything seeping into a space that is infinitely small, and once you begin to approach that finite point of encroaching upon nothingness, real nothingness. But as soon as you’re able to hold that thought, everything jumps back to life, as it has always been, and your incapability to imagine nothingness makes sense.

The software, the operating system you are based upon has been shaped over innumerous years, with its only goal to make identical copies of itself, so how would it help in the slightest if the hardware it was running on was able to picture its own nonexistence, however it's not as though we never nod to our own impermanence, after all we create phrases such as YOLO for a reason.

A sense of your own mortality should scare you, it doesn’t follow you the same way as a predator hunting its prey would, it follows in a more ignorable way, how a scavenger might find its way to its next meal. So there you are perceived as permanent, wired to the belief that true nothingness does not exist, this pulls you into the belief of your own security, a due date far in the future “summer reading” if you will.

And yet this sense of security is the sole reason you are and become cowardly, your mistakes, your failures, will stick with you forever and as long as you live. Shame, embarrassment, they will never leave you. Such a distant “due date” forces you to play it safe, why do it now when I can do it tomorrow? If you could picture what the end would be like, then what would there to be afraid of?

You then are in a sense solely afraid of yourself, be it consciously or unconsciously. You are the one that tells yourself not to do something. Why did you not answer that question in class, even though you were certain you were right. Because you stopped yourself, just stand and say what you will, if you’re incorrect the criticisms are only last in the moment, and even then the only reason that those criticisms affect you, is because you let them. You allow them to hold yourself back.

Now I’m not saying just go do whatever you want to, YOLO if you will. You still have to live within the guidelines of being a good person. You have to know when to be quiet stop talking and just let it go, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have your own opinions, just don’t constantly make people mad or uncomfortable.

And don’t get me wrong, my intent is not glorify nihilism, I’m not trying to tell you what to do with yourself after you die and that being cremated is bad blasting all the energy that was once stored in your molecules into space and that you should be buried, allowing the worms and microorganisms eat you and return your energy back into the earth where it belongs, restarting the circle of life.

No, I’m here to explain to you that, yes you will die, and you will be gone, but take it as a lesson that you should live your life to the fullest extent and to of what you desire, don’t be held back by yourself, just go out there and do what it is you want, because what is today but yesterday's tomorrow.