This I Believe

Half of the battle in life is accepting the present state of being. Whether the situation you are in is absolutely perfect or insane to the point that it drives you to the edge, the most you can do is embrace it, deal with it accordingly, and move on to whatever curveball life pitches at you next. I believe in having faith when there is nothing but darkness.
I have the privilege of living in a sufficient house with a fully functioning set of parents that provides all I need and more. Some might even consider me spoiled, but I appreciate the most minuscule gestures of kindness, as simple as having my mother brew me green tea. There was a point in my life that I took everything I had for granted. I joined half of the other teenagers my age and expected every little thing to be done for me. I played the fool: lazy, selfish, and arrogant.
One day, I opened my eyes and began to comprehend the turmoil in the world around me. I tuned in to Fox News to see the victims of the vicious Hurricane Katrina who had lost every possession they had to their name. On the Yahoo homepage, I saw pictures of children crying over the school books they had spent their precious money on, destroyed in a mudslide. It hurt to see these children mourning over the very thing that I dread, longing for something so small as an education. Commercials depicted famished children in Africa who cannot sleep with a sound mind, not knowing when their next meal might even be. Then, I looked at my own self in the mirror. Here I was: an upper-middle class teenage girl complaining about taking out the trash. I realized how pitiful and utterly stupid I was. I began to fathom how blessed I was to have clothes on my back, and yet I complained about cleaning my room. The guilt overwhelmed me and I realized how truly fortunate I was. I thought of my mother’s family in their native country of the Philippines, rejoicing over the large brown box my family had sent them, full of American goodies and my old clothing. The clothes that I deemed as trash were welcomed like gold to the painfully poor people. If I could be as appreciative as them for such little things, I realized how much more content I would be in life.
Think about the darker times in life, and compare them to the horror you hear about in the third world countries. It almost seems unreal, but the pain in these places is merely miles away. Those little children who have so little manage to smile their beautiful smiles, so why can’t we share the same content happiness with what we have? There is beauty to be found in times of no hope, and when light is shone upon the dark, what is there to fear?