Do you value your life?

So I am sitting at school. Been 5 weeks since I officially withdrawn from High School of my senior year. I had to run some errands that required me to go to school, so I decided to take October 5, 2009 to go to school and visit my friends for the full class day. And I enter my old classes. I look around and I begin to think. I begin to wonder what my friends are thinking – studying AP Calculus, AP Environmental Science, and Discrete Mathematics. After an hour thought and a quick 15 minute nap, I came to a simple understanding. They don’t value their lives and they don’t even realize it.

How did I come up with this radical conclusion? Well think about it. Here my friends are, studying Discrete Mathematics. The subject of the day was Functions. Sitting here, I try to grasp what’s being taught for an hour and forty-five minutes every weekday. Strangely enough, once I understood it, I also understood how meaningless it was too me. Yes I know there are those who strive to become phenomenal computer engineers and software/hardware developers, but the majority of people are not like that. So I am thinking to myself, “If I don’t find this very useful, what are the chances my peers find it useful?”. Well, I decided to answer my question and ask my friends. The Result? Well I got two main answers. The first being the exact same thing I was thinking, “it was useless”. The second most prominent answer was, “so I can get into a good college.” The immediate question that pops into my head after hearing “so I can get into a good college” is what is the purpose of that. Well, the purpose of going to a good college is simple. It’s been engrained in their minds since they began school. It was to get a good job, where they would than follow to trade their time for money.

Hmm. The one thing I can say without lie is that we will all die. Sooner or later. Yes, I know it’s a bit grim, but it’s a fact of life - death. So that leaves this little bit of time spent on this little planet that defines our lives. It’s this little dash in between our birthday and our deathday embossed on our epitaph. Time is all we have on this earth. It IS our life, but yet we trade it by the hour for 40, 30, 20, and sometimes even as little as 5 measly dollars. What’s even worse is that in the real world, I see people not only just trade their lives for money, but also take up jobs they resent and dread. My friends commonly approach me with the argument that “what if they like the job they have and love it do it?”. My only response would be to ask “would they do it for free?”. There’s another common counterargument I am contested with. “But we need money to live, else we would have no life to live at all.” And to this statement, all I can do is dread the future. The fact that they assume that no job equates to no money at all ultimately reveals how deeply rooted this idea of working for someone as the only option is in our society. The idea of earning a living in a way other than working for company doesn’t even exist in their minds!

 “All my possessions for a moment of time.”

-         Elizabeth I

These are words spoken by Queen Elizabeth while she was waning away. What good is all of the riches of the world if we have not the time to enjoy them? Time. It is our life. Let us place a bit more value in it. Even I at times, forget the significance of time. Spend it with the ones we love. Free it from stress and pain. Cherish it as it is blessed and precious.