Life is Hard by Alexa

Life is Hard by Alexa - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

When I was in high school, we had a teacher who was more than a teacher. A known, independently wealthy man, who taught simply to fulfill his love of teaching, who whistled down the hallway and always had a smile to share, gave us more than we ever could have bargained for.
In between physics and chemistry lessons, he taught us life lessons. As time went on and academics got increasingly difficult, so did life. Academics brought us to his classroom for help, life lessons kept us there for hours after studying was done. Throughout the years we had this man as a teacher, many fellow students ended up going through things that no kid should ever have to deal with. How does one man always have the answers? Whether it was the death of a sibling or having to miss an absurd amount of school to take a family member to rehab, he had the words. Whether it was a homeless fellow student or the crumbling of a family, he could help. This eventually pegged the question, how does one acquire so much knowledge on fixing horrible situations? Because they’d done it before.
Finally, it seemed the bad things had stopped coming for my classmates. But that didn’t mean the learned stopped. Collectively, we’d matured that year, and this teacher felt that we were ready to hear the hardships he’d overcome and the lessons that were taken from them.
“Life isn’t easy,” he told us time and time again. Sharing his own personal struggles with us was his way of showing that he wasn’t just talking the talk, he had walked the walk. In his own words, he wasn’t there to “blow sunshine up our nether regions, he tells it like it is.” Life is hard. But with every “life is hard” story he shared, there was a “but this is how you overcome it” lesson.
So, how do you overcome the “life is hard” moments? Well, before we could learn how to overcome it, he told us exactly how NOT to overcome it. We found out that all the knowledge that he possessed accrued piece by piece from failing to overcome that little thing called “life.” How don’t you overcome the hardships? You don’t give into drinking, not matter how much you’d rather drink yourself into unconsciousness than remember what happened. You don't turn to drugs when getting high on artificial substances is the only way that you can drag yourself out of bed in the morning. You don’t lock yourself away from the world and cut yourself off from your friends, family and society because you’d rather suffer by yourself than inflict the horrors of combat you witnessed on anyone else to deal with. Yeah, life is hard.
“Do you know why I whistle in the hallway?” he asked us one day. “A lot of people think it’s because I’m happy, and a lot of people even find it annoying, but whistling a song I love keeps me from getting trapped inside my own head with a memory I hate.” That’s overcoming “hard.” Talking about the unmentionable things he witnessed to handpicked classrooms full of students to remind them that not everything is not about them and that some people have bigger things going on is overcoming “hard.”
So we left after those couple years being mentored by this man with a lot of life lessons. In fact, he shared so much with us that we started keeping a list of quotes to turn to when we needed guidance. But ultimately, what is the most important lesson I’ve ever learned from a teacher? Not that life is hard. That’s a given. Yes, life is hard. But if there is anything I can take away from all the wisdom this teacher shared with me, it’s that “hard” can be overcome.