Senior year is the stage where we have to contemplate and eventually decide what we want to make for ourselves. It is the last year in high school and after that, either we will be going to college or go straight to the work force. By that time, we have already decided what we want to do with our life. College will prepare us with the kind of profession that we would like to have or omit the training of college by going straight to work force. Either way, we are already going to a path of independence and our senior year maybe the last year of our dependency to our parents. Eventually, we will have no choice but to pursue our own life and so we have to do our utmost today while we still have time to prepare for our future. As Anthony Doerr would say in his work All the Light We Cannot See “Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever” (Doerr, 2017) where he meant that time lost is a lost opportunity and could no longer be had back.
In a way, I likened myself to the character of Marie-Laure, a blind girl who was dependent to her father. Her father, in his effort to enable her to survive when he is gone, made her a miniature of their neighborhood for her to learn to navigate their place. Though blind, Marie-Laure studied the city through touch. I may not be literally blind but as a young person who used to be unaware to the workings of the world, I can also be considered blind and entirely dependent to my parents. Without my parents, I would not have survived life and become what I am today. As my parent’s effort to enable me navigate and survive life, they provided me education (which is the equivalent of the miniature) with the hope that I could be independent and would live a good life someday.
I must admit that thinking about the prospect of living life independently can be daunting. Let alone to contemplate and decide with what I want with my life someday. I have a lot of things that I want but I am not yet sure which one I really wanted to pursue. This is consistent with the line in Doerr’s work “We act in our own self-interest. . . The trick is figuring out where your interests are” (Doerr, 2017) because figuring out the trick where our interests are can be really tricky. Often, young people like me can be fickle minded that we may seem not to know what we really want. My parents kept on reminding me to know what I really want and until now I still have not entirely figured it out yet.
I still have not entirely figured it out yet with what I want in my life because I am still in the process of discovering life itself. Every time I learned of new things, I got interested and some of them I find fascinating that made me hesitant to decide what I really want with my life. But I know that eventually, I have to be independent and that time will surely come. I believe I will be ready by that time not because I am brave but because I have to just like what Marie-Laure have said “When I lost my sight . . . I [will be] brave” (Doerr, 2017) meaning, that when the time will come that I have to be independent, I would know what to do because I have to.
- Doerr, A. (2017). All the light we cannot see: a novel. New York, NY: Scribner.