Serenity and Philosophy by Jake

Serenity and Philosophy by Jake - February 2024 Scholarship Essay

I used to believe serenity was something that came in waves in life.
Waves, crashing like the ocean, the congregation of thousands of particles of water indiscriminately hitting sandbanks. It was this indeterminate crashing of waves that I somehow correlated with the calm, peaceful moments in life. Those moments that allowed me to wake up in the morning. The days after a terrible exam, the hours after I realized I had managed to leave the house without the one paper I needed, and the seconds after I first learned that I lost my grandfather in India while I was away at sea. I took these moments as signs that life could only get better; maybe these dips could signify the coming of more outstanding rises and peace was coming. Maturity is something we can wish to attain but not something we can learn to expect, and as my high school life continued, I soon realized that peace and happiness were not something I could predict. Life is absurd, and it hurts you most when you try to make any meaning of it as it stares coldly back at you. How can one attain peace knowing the next moment of despair is just around the corner? These were the ideas that circulated me as I began to stagger through my classes, questioning the importance of any of them. Most hurtful of all was my great ability to maintain the persona of false faith in the systems of the world.

A lesson I learned that I will take with me forever is that there is always a figure in literature whose struggles can match your own. It took myth to unravel my uncertainty with reality, as I soon came to grips with the tale and life of Sisyphus. Condemned to the deepest pits of the Underworld, Sisyphus undertakes a meaningless task of pushing forward a boulder that will never reach its peak and will always come crashing right back down. However, it is this constant struggle that drives us as humans to be happy, and, as a famous philosopher once noted, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Sisyphus represents the constant cycle of struggle that we all endure in life. Just like my newfound heroine, I learned to persevere every day, not in order to seek any specific peace, but rather just to mold something anew of myself. I took opportunities that I would not have ever done before. I became involved in my community by volunteering at my local library and even positioning myself to become a poll worker. The constant feeling of pointlessness was once something that bogged me down. I once believed that the consistent routine of school was inconsequential and meaningless in the bigger picture. I now realize that every day, one must push forward even in knowing that the next day will just be the same as the last because every new day one will develop slowly into a newer, better human. My disappointment with school shifted into approval as I gained many new experiences in the successes of our Robotics team, the patience that came from tutoring others, and the daily pursuit of new knowledge that only school could fulfill. This is not to say that my new understanding thanks to absurdist philosophy miraculously cured my tendency to fail. No, instead, I learned that failure is the only way to grow, and, just like how Sisyphus got further inch-by-inch with each attempt, each failure propels me to work harder and develop further. These experiences all led to a convalescence in my life wherein I realized I wanted to further pursue Philosophy in my college studies. Because serenity does not come in waves, it is instead the everlasting feeling that comes from the freedom to keep pushing forwards as I hope to do in Philosophy.