Paul Bowers
When I look back on my high school career and try to offer advice to underclassmen, I feel a bit like that aging uncle-twice-removed who meets you for the first time at a cousin’s wedding and begins spouting off highly improbable stories from his distant past. It is not that I am insane—although I have approached that ledge on several occasions over the past four years—it is just that nobody wants to listen when I expound upon the value of hard work.
I am fully aware that making this statement places me just below the Math Team on the all-important hierarchy of cool, but the harsh fact of the matter is that high school is not about buying clothes or playing in garage bands. It is about determination. Guidance counselors and teachers have pumped us so full of self-esteem-centric thinking and confidence-boosting pep talks that many of us have lost our grip on academic reality.
Maybe you have already heard this message from your parents so many times that you could recite it verbatim, but here it is: In the end, hard work is going to pay off. I know this is true because I am here at the end today. Life does not offer many just rewards, but I recently received several hefty paychecks for my efforts in the form of college scholarships. I will begin attending the Honors College at the University of South Carolina in the fall, and I will not have to pay a penny for tuition or living expenses for the next four years of my education.
Some of my friends seem to think that schoolwork comes naturally to me, but I find it hard to accept the idea of high school being a natural experience for anyone. We are placed in a cinder block building, trained like Pavlovian dogs to respond to various bells, and asked to remain quiet and attentive while we learn about things that often neither interest us nor apply to our lives. If you can find one person for whom this is organic and effortless, I will show you a robot.
It was not easy for me. There were weeks when my total sleeping hours approached the recommended amount for one night, and there were entire months when the mere thought of walking through the halls of Summerville High School made me wince. High school was often unpleasant, and all too often, I allowed it to grind me down.
My darkest hours were during my junior year. I was taking hard classes with difficult teachers, and I spent most of my nights studying and doing homework rather than sleeping. Unfortunately, this period of intense sleep deprivation coincided with—and possibly contributed to—the deepest, most cynical spell of disenchantment of my young life. I was quickly losing hope in myself and in all of humanity, and while an outside observer might have attributed this to stress, I knew that what I was feeling was much deeper than that. For the first time in my life, my eyelids were being peeled back, and I was seeing my existence as it truly is: short, paradoxical, and egregiously unfair. Like King Solomon of the Old Testament, I was trapped in a conclusion that life was, at its very core, meaningless.
And yet I kept working. A phrase kept running through my mind: “Arbeit macht frei,” a German phrase that was posted above the gate to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz and which roughly translates to “Work shall set you free.” At the time of its use, it mocked the weary souls passing beneath it, and I wrongly saw myself as a prisoner.
Looking back, I know that I was wrong to follow this line of thought. While I was busy pitying myself and mourning the death of my American Dream, I was forgetting that the vast majority of the world’s population would never even have a chance to pursue a dream or to receive a functional education. But the education that I was receiving—and that I continue to receive—is about more than the quadratic formula or the American Revolution. It is about the daily revolutions in my mind and the education that transcends simple knowledge to instill wisdom in the open heart. I came to the realization that I was not simply engaged in the pursuit of facts and figures; I was learning life.
Things did not get any easier for me that year. I still often felt frustrated, exhausted, and even isolated, but the one thing that changed was my mindset. During my morning drives to school, I no longer sat in idle dread of the day to come. Instead, I repeated a simple prayer: “Pull me through.”
Throughout high school, I have often allowed my spirit to be crushed and my mind to be dominated by a profound pessimism, but I never relented in my work. It is not that I devoted my entire life to school—I was an avid writer, athlete and musician throughout—but I never relaxed my stranglehold on my academic work. In a sense, work did bring freedom: freedom from sloth, from regret, and from the shallowness of the human heart.
It is my firm belief that our nobility lies in the way we behave in our bleakest moments. My advice to high school students comes in two parts. To those who are putting forth anything less than their best effort, I cannot stress enough the importance of a self-imposed dedication to hard work. If you think that school is too difficult, then just wait for the so-called “real world” (whatever that may be) to hit you. I cannot speak authoritatively, but I have heard from literally hundreds of trustworthy sources that life is no easier out there than in the locker-lined halls of academia. This applies to anyone who is not living up to his or her full potential, from the underachieving freshman to the tired senior who can’t bear to take a full load of classes.
And as for the intellectually and physically exhausted, the students who ache in ways that defy description, the ones who have never known any way except the hard way: cling to your work ethic and your hope, and you will remain afloat. Life does have a meaning, and it is ours to discover.