This reprise diary is inspired by WarrenS, whose diary I highly recommend. Please go show him some love.
What follows is an essay I submitted last year for a college essay contest. I also diaried it here as The Essay That Did Not Win.
I offer it again, because, well, I like it. I hope you do also.
Peace.
Imagine a set of tubular windchimes, such as the one pictured on the cover page of this essay. [Sorry, no photo here. It's just an ordinary set of wood wind chimes.] First think of just the tubes themselves. Each has a different resonant frequency, capable of responding to a stimulus and reacting with sounding vibration; musical notes, if you will. Now consider the windchimes as a whole. Composed of various objects -- bits of string, wood, glass, and perhaps metal, some simple and some partly complex -- a set of windchimes forms an entity unto itself. Shaped to the design of others, the individual components connect together to produce a more complex purposed system. Working in concert, the windchime system produces music which is that of the world: peaceful and soothing at times, loud and annoying at others, quiescent or silent on occasion. Playing only the notes given them by their creator, windchimes still somehow manage to compose, in a natural and random fashion, an alluring symphony all of their own.
The formation of a windchime begins with a quiescent thought, a silent idea in the craftperson's mind. The crafter transforms this idea into a purposed design of peaceful intent, which is to produce a soothing sound. In contrast, the actual process of making windchimes often involves loud and unsoothing noises, smells, and effects, from wood cutting, metal working, and glass blowing. But so it is that the music of the world is infused into a set of windchimes from its very inception.
As I contemplate these reflections of a set of windchimes, it comes to me that my life so far has been as a tubular bell within a set of windchimes. Having come into existence by no means of my own, my tone has been shaped to the desires and influences of others, yet it is ultimately dependent on my inherent qualities. Were I brass, I would never sound the same as a tube of wood or copper or glass, regardless of whether my shape and dimensions were exactly the same as of those other tubes, nor would I be any different otherwise than I am, despite the best intentions, designs, and efforts of my crafter. It is not until I am polished and struck that it will ever be known whether my mold contained some hidden flaw, or that my alloy was free of damaging contaminants, or if my forging has been accomplished in proper time and at correct temperature.
As each individual bell is connected into its set of chimes by flexible cords, so am I connected to my own set, to my society, by the supple bonds of personal and professional relationships. As windchime tubes dangle in the spirit of nature, subject to the vagaries of the winds, and repeatedly drummed by the windchime clapper, so I flourish in the nurture of my kindred humanity and in the nature of the real world, subject to the vicissitudes of life. My music is also that of the world, at times silent or unheard, at others low and peaceful, at others firm and compelling, and sometimes obnoxious. I am but a tube, monotonic on my own but consonant, harmonic, and sympathetic to my neighbors. Able to voice a concrete note among the melodies and cacophonies of my society, together we produce a concerto worthy of self-applause, if nothing else.
The foregoing simile will serve, I hope, as a presentation of where I have been in life. But will it hold, I wonder, in speaking to the question of where I am going? After all, a single tubular chime has no possibility of becoming something else than what it is, at least not on its own. So in that sense it cannot change. It is static, inflexible, immutable, and trivial. These are not properties that I wish for myself. I prefer being dynamic, amenable, yielding, accomodating, thoughtful, funny, loving, and inventive. Even though I find my current station to be liveable, it could always be better, and I want it to be better. I do not wish this only for myself; I wish this for all others alike. So, extending the simile, instead of being a windchime I'd rather be a Moog synthesizer endowed with artificial intelligence, able to create an unending series of new performances, new musical paradigms, dissonances and harmonies previously thought impossible; tones, sounds, chords, rhythms and time signatures never heard of before. In short, I want to be unique, vastly productive, and if possible, unending. Of course no such synthesizer exists, and even if it did I am not a Moog synthesizer. I am a human being. I am neither artifact nor machine. I live, and therefore unlike a windchime or a synthesizer, I can change. Indeed, I do change.
This, then, forms the answer to the question of where I'm going. My hopes, my aspirations, my joys, my disappointments, my successes and failures, they all hinge on my ability to change. I will make the best of my life by always being willing to adapt, to modify, to be different. My personal philosophy, or weltanschauung, includes the maxim that I should labor to create a better world to live in today than there was yesterday, and a better world tomorrow than there is today. It also includes the principle that we should lead enjoyable lives, and help others (to lead enjoyable lives). I believe this can be accomplished by what I have coined The Platinum Rule: Treat yourself well, and treat others at least as well as you treat yourself.
There is but one thing now left to say: No matter what the future brings, I'll see you in the future.