Assignment 2: This I Believe Statement
This assignment served as an introduction to reflective writing. It's scary to delve so deeply into yourself sometimes, and that is why it is so rare that people take the time to truly reflect at a deep level. To begin, we were assigned the task of reading and summarizing three essays from the This I Believe website (http://thisibelieve.org/). We were allowed to pick any three essays we desired. The trend seemed to be that people picked essays based upon personal interests and hobbies, which lead me to conclude that we subconsciously construct beliefs all the time. The hard part is fleshing these ideas out and voicing them.
After we discussed our essays and summaries in our small groups, we discussed as a class what made the essays so attractive. Overall, we agreed that all of the essays were somehow relate-able and that this quality is what gave them so much power. Then, of course, we had to take time to construct our own essay, a statement of a fundamental belief and guiding principle for life. Mine is below.
The most difficult part of this assignment for me was deciding what I truly believed and what things I parrot as my beliefs because I feel like other people expect me to hold those beliefs. Unfortunately, this is one of the greatest flaws of a judgmental society such as ours. We should not have to mold ourselves to the beliefs of the society as a whole, even though societal beliefs and values may heavily influence individual beliefs. I had to peel back my layers of concealing beliefs and examine myself from a whole new light. And then, there was pressure to come up with some belief that was revolutionary and could change the world. Not all beliefs are like that, and this is a trap I think too many of us fall into when we examine ourselves. Again, we are holding ourselves to the standards of others instead of a standard that we create for our own person. The belief I wrote about in my essay, though certainly not my only belief, quickly became my most prominent and personally powerful belief as I discarded all of the societal and interpersonal baggage. Casting off this "baggage" revealed to me things about myself I had not previously considered and opened possibilities to new life pathways.
After we discussed our essays and summaries in our small groups, we discussed as a class what made the essays so attractive. Overall, we agreed that all of the essays were somehow relate-able and that this quality is what gave them so much power. Then, of course, we had to take time to construct our own essay, a statement of a fundamental belief and guiding principle for life. Mine is below.
The most difficult part of this assignment for me was deciding what I truly believed and what things I parrot as my beliefs because I feel like other people expect me to hold those beliefs. Unfortunately, this is one of the greatest flaws of a judgmental society such as ours. We should not have to mold ourselves to the beliefs of the society as a whole, even though societal beliefs and values may heavily influence individual beliefs. I had to peel back my layers of concealing beliefs and examine myself from a whole new light. And then, there was pressure to come up with some belief that was revolutionary and could change the world. Not all beliefs are like that, and this is a trap I think too many of us fall into when we examine ourselves. Again, we are holding ourselves to the standards of others instead of a standard that we create for our own person. The belief I wrote about in my essay, though certainly not my only belief, quickly became my most prominent and personally powerful belief as I discarded all of the societal and interpersonal baggage. Casting off this "baggage" revealed to me things about myself I had not previously considered and opened possibilities to new life pathways.
This I Believe | |
File Size: | 14 kb |
File Type: | docx |