thoughts-need-shared

[thoughts-need-shared]

Respect is Earned, Not Given

95% of my life, I strive to be a good person, whether that happens...debatable, but being a good person is difficult. Being a good person everyday is relatively impossible, with the exception of a handful of people, people take being a good person in stride and it comes in spurts. Some days are better than others and being a good person is all about how you treat the person next to you, how you treat yourself, how you act, respond, speak, carry yourself, and grow. It does not matter who is next to me, a child, adult, elder, peer, but if you treat me as an equal, I will treat you as the same, but why does it matter who it is? This is what society forces down young adults and teenagers throats is that adults deserve respect and to show them the respect that they deserve. Why? Because they have lived longer than us? Have had more hardships and struggles? What makes their hardships worse than ours and what make their struggles more worthy of respect than ours? Respect should never be handed out for free to anyone, respect needs to be earned, now being polite and courteous to everyone is a different story. Politeness and being courteous stems from your values and virtues and is what earns you some respect. If I am polite and courteous to you, does not mean by any means that you are respected, it is that I am being the person I wish to be. Adults demand respect, which is completely absurd, respect is a gift, to be respected by anyone, is an honor. Respect is earned through numerous ideologies, regarding personality. Understanding, compassion, and probably the largest factor, for me, is in my eyes, are you a good person? Being a good person is difficult and I understand that not everyone is going to be an amazing person every single day, but after a whole year, if you are rude, disrespectful, or degrading etc. to me or anyone else I have witnessed, respect will not be doled out to you. For someone to earn my respect, they have to come off to me as attempting to be a good person, that is all I ask, is that you try to be a good person. Everything else comes second but is it that hard to try and better yourself and those around you?

[thoughts-need-shared]

You can’t rush through

As much as I myself, despise high school and the intricacies which consume eight hours of my day, every Monday through Friday, people need to realize the amount of opportunities that they can have if they apply themselves. Possibilities are endless and grow everyday without bounds but kids and teens in schools around the world only care about leaving high school. This is the only thing they are concerned with is escaping school, and for what reason, so you can go home and “blaze up”, go to sleep, watch Youtube videos, or something unproductive and possibly detrimental to their lives. People have the opportunity to build themselves and their mind to the fullest potential yet they concern themselves with escaping high school and when they get to leave, don’t get me wrong I’m not going to cry when I graduate or anything but that will be because I realize that I utilized high school for its greatest purpose, knowledge and construction. I apply myself to try to learn everything, and mistakes come and go, but i realize that i have roughly 180 days x 8 hours x 4 years in which inevitably the lesson will be reiterated throughout one of those hours in which I make another effort to learn and educate myself. No, I’m not perfect and I don’t expect to come off as such, I apply myself to learning and yearn for knowledge, its one of the two things I expect out of high school, the second is construction. No, of course I’m not talking about when people put bricks on top of each other for a year to build a building, but self-construction. High school is a time to establish yourself as you, develop values, habits, character virtues and a code. If nothing else is accomplished through high school but self-construction and growth throughout everyday of high school then, high school was a success. If you grow and build yourself everyday then you have accomplished more than you or anyone else will ever know. Success will fall into your arms if you grow yourself everyday during high school, push yourself past boundaries, fears and anxiety inducing activities. If you mature everyday of high school and improve your life and those around you everyday, success will fall like rain like you live in a rain forest. Sadly, people and teens of high school don’t realize this and it enrages me, the opportunity that they have everyday for roughly 720 days, 5,760 hours and most likely more, to learn and grow and build and progress is one of America’s greatest gifts and it is thrown away by hundreds of thousands of kids and whined about by tens of thousands of kids every single day. You can’t force anything that improves humans, they must want it themselves, they must be, to quote my eighth grade history teacher, “intrinsically motivated” to improve themselves and forcing lessons and tests down kids throats in high school won’t solve anything, only infuriate them, but that is for a different rant...