When I was a senior in high school, I took a composition class. The big final assignment was to make a senior
valedictory. Basically a farewell to
high school. This project was pretty much the reason for taking the class. You
write a paper, the exact contents of which I don’t really remember, and you get
to make a video and show it to the class. This video was a compilation of what
ever pictures you wanted to include to show your journey through life in general and high school.
It definitely stuck with me more than any assignment I’ve ever done, and I
think most people who have done it would agree. Although it hadn’t crossed my
mind in a long time until very recently, I now find myself thinking about it a
lot. And I get sort of angry about it. But why would an old high school
assignment pop up in my mind and annoy me now?
I mean at the time, it really was an awesome assignment.
There was one gigantic flaw to it though…
You had to answer a series of questions and talk about
world events a little bit and just basically what you took out of high
school. But one of the first questions you have to answer and pretty much the overall
topic for the entire assignment was to come up with the meaning of life. I
repeat, they asked a bunch of kids to tell you what the meaning of life is. Are
you kidding me?! I was seventeen. I
barely knew the meaning of algebra. You want me to tell you what the hell we’re
doing here and why? I can’t tell you that now, nor do I ever expect to. There are times that I’m pretty sure pizza and
Oreos are the meaning of life. And some days, they are.
At the time, I wasn’t particularly bothered by it, so many
other kids before me participated in it so it’s probably fine. Why should I
have a problem with it if most other kids didn’t? I remember being shocked and
then staring at my computer blankly before writing down something generic that
I have no hope of remembering. I thought it was pretty weird to ask kids to
wrap their head around something so immense so I purposely worded mine to be
“the meaning of life according to a seventeen year old kid”. If someone picked
up on it, great. If not, I still followed the rules.
I think the reason this assignment bothers me so much now is
because I’ve been thinking a lot about perception recently. And how no two people
see a situation the same. We all perceive everything completely different than
the person next to us. That goes for something as small as whether or not that
pizza was delicious (the answer is always yes) or something unimaginable like
what is the meaning of life.
We all place our own meanings on everything. And those
meanings change- constantly. This project bothers me because it puts the idea
in kids’ heads that there actually is
a meaning to life and we have to go find it. Just sending us on an endless and
ultimately disappointing mission. If we spend all our time searching for the
meaning of life, we’ll miss out on life itself, and therefore miss out on the
answer.
I want so badly to go back in time and change my answer in the paper. I
wish I had listened to my initial reaction and I wish I had challenged that
assignment. I think the reason I get angry about it now is because I totally
bought into it. Just like most everyone else. I sat there for hours trying to
think of the right answer to a
question that has no right answer. I
feel tricked.
I wish someone had said any of this to us when we were doing
the assignment. I wish they told us to remember that there is no right answer
and whatever you choose to say only needs to be true to you in that moment. And be comfortable with
the fact that in the next moment, it might not be. It’s not a question of THE
meaning of life, but rather YOUR meaning right now.
With Love
Kim
P.S. If you're interested in the video I've spent all this time talking about, here's the link to it.
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