Why?

  The world is a whole mystery.  Life is really a mystery. Why? Isn't that the question that we ask ourselves the most? At least I do, but I never get many answers. We don't have time. No time to think, question, reflect. Why? Why do we keep on asking if we never get the answer? Why do we keep on struggling to know every single detail?

 Since day one we touch, experiment, investigate, look around trying to understand. We've been always trying to understand how. How energy flows, how particles move, how the sky is blue. I believe that every single person has a mission in the world, we are not here to follow the crowd, we are here to discover, change.

  What are you here for? Haven't you always wondered? Are we here to create? To question? To learn? I have always believed in each single person being one tiny chance to change the human perspective of life. I am sure that there is a lot more in life than what we get nowadays. Life was once something else, a different concept, it was what you made from it.

    Each day our lives become more structured. I refuse to think that we are born, we go to school, we study a career, maybe form a family, get old and finally we die.

Why do we agree with this? Why do we let ourselves be controlled by a government? Why are we so structured in everything? Maybe we know so much that we cannot appreciate what life is really about, what we want to achieve in it, not what we have to. We might think that life is now right just the way it is, but how can we be so sure if we don't know how a different world would taste? We only know this way of living, the one we are used to. We need to find a new way that focuses on what we want, and in making the most out of life in every single day without

stopping.

   You can do it. We can do it.

   What do you want? I want to control my own destiny.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul. -

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed. -

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.

   William Ernest Henley wrote this poem, when he was in hospital with tuberculosis. He contracted a tubercular infection that led to his leg being amputated below the knee. Later on the same thing happened to the second one, but he refused to have it amputated. He sought for the help of a new doctor who had developed an antiseptic medicine and almost two years later he got out of hospital. Those times were dark for Henley, and we can really appreciate that in this poem.

   Even in horrible circumstances, Henley refused to let life defeat him, but instead he rose up and fought back. He did not waste his time crying over what he had lost, but instead focused on getting better. He refused to submit to the idea that someone else was in control of his life.

I keep on repeating to myself. "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul".

Nelson Mandela was inspired by this poem. He helped bring equality to South Africa being a Negro. That is my role model, someone who makes the impossible possible.

   Why? Why should we do this? Why should we listen to this thirteen-year-old girl? How is she even so sure about something so complicated?

    " Sometimes it's not the questions that are hard, it's the answers."

    We might need to stop questioning a bit, and live.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

― Oscar Wilde

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria