Big dreams and crazy things by Savannah

Big dreams and crazy things by Savannah - March 2018 Scholarship Essay

When I was in second grade I was in love with learning. I watched Planet Earth on repeat until my family hid the DVD in their bedroom closet. I gobbled up words on the pages of books about animals and gross creepy bugs. I covered my walls in posters of the solar system and arrived to the school Halloween party as an astronaut, with a helmet that would fog up every two minutes from my breathing. Now I am a high school student. I get my work done and I get the grades I want. I do my homework but take no joy in it. The books I once poured over now sit dusty on my bookshelf, and I am forever wishing I could revive the passion I once had for a life a learning.

If I could offer any words of advice to the kid I once was I would say this: Never let the pursuit of a grade or the pressure of a GPA dull the joy of learning new things. Stay strong in your will to absorb new information, to travel to new places, and to imagine what everyone else says to be impossible. In elementary school, my friends Austin, Alec, Taz, and I came up with a grand scheme. We had decided that over summer vacation we were going to have our parents drive us to Canada, take a boat out to where the Titanic was sunk and explore it’s ruins. We saw ourselves as archeologists in the making, pioneers in a field we knew nothing of. It would be an Indiana Jones worthy adventure filled with missing artifacts, long road trips, and the dangerous intricacies involved with creating something that could carry us all the way down into the ocean’s depths. Our excitement was relentless, but so was our parent’s refusal to entertain such a silly request. They were not as thrilled as we were about the idea of driving halfway across another country to allow their eight-year old children to unearth the mysteries of a sunken ship, and thus our plans dissipated only to dreams.

Looking back I realize how silly it was to have expected our plans to go through, however when I think about that I remember the vivid excitement we had for something that had stemmed out of our shared love of history and archaeology, of too many Indiana Jones movies in Austin’s treehouse, of the thrill of learning, exploring, imagining. Somehow along the road of life and development, I lost that thrill. I got caught up in the stress and the movement of days into months and I forgot to dream and to devour what made this life worth living. I became so obsessed with getting the grade that I lost sight of the end goal, to learn and take in what sets my soul aflame. Do not make my same mistakes. Hold on to the passion that makes learning enjoyable and freeing. Always remember that the purpose of life is to take from what we have learned and thought and to craft from it a world where people are allowed to have and pursue their crazy dreams.