Thesis: The Story of Life

So... in a moment of brilliance or boredom... i sat down and wrote out a 4 page blurb explaining where my thesis idea came from and why it is important to me... and here it is for all of you to read. Enjoi!

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The story of my thesis, is the story of my life. It is the story of all of our lives to an extent. It is the story of choice; The choice to make your own destiny and find your own opportunities. It’s the story of choosing to build your own dreams vs. sitting idly by in the hopes that life will build them for you.

As cheesy, lame and artsy as it may sound, the revelations of this story came out of a dream I had. Sure, it is based on the observation of life, but it was in my dreams that it was revealed with a clarity that I might never easily achieve in my waking state.

In this dream, there was a character with no legs who walked on his hands. He was a lonely sort of character who lived in a lonely sort of world. He decides one day to go out and try to find something new to cheer him up and happens upon a small cave. Upon entering the cave he sees a soft blue light that eventually leads him to an underground lake full of a glowing, “magical” liquid. The liquid transforms him into a brilliant and colorful version of himself. It also grants him the ability to pass this beauty into the world around him, transforming it as well.

Of course the deep underlying meaning that I pulled out of this dream was that it was my subconscious reminding me that it is up to us as individuals to go out and seek positive opportunities for ourselves. Then, upon finding those opportunities, allow them to affect us in a positive manner and teach us to grow from those experiences. We then can, in turn, pass that newly found knowledge on to others.

On the flip side it also warned of the dangers of complacency. It warned that all too often we run the risk of just sitting around and waiting for good fortune to fall into our laps. While that may occasionally happen to some, the majority of us must find the motivation to go seek our own opportunities and create our own good fortune.

The dream was very much a mental retelling of my own life story. For a long time I had played the, “Good things come to those who are patient” card. I played my life choices very safe. My choice in undergraduate college was a safe one. It was far enough from home to feel slightly independent but close enough to still have a security blanket to fall upon. And while not a totally wasted experience, it was a potentially dangerous one in regards to lulling me into complacency with life. However, when my back was against the wall, and I had to make a choice of whether to settle with the education I received and wait for something good to come of it or make the bold decision to go to graduate school and create bigger and better opportunities, I thankfully chose the latter. The result being that I found my own shining lake in the people I met, the places I went, and ultimately, within myself.

Of course, my actual thesis story has changed a bit since then. It is now the story of two characters, whose world has gone awry and effectively shut down. These characters must decide whether to accept their fate, or go out and change it. They, of course, decide to strike out across their world in search of the “control room” in the hope of finding a way to reboot their planet. Using a map they find, they succeed and finding the room they seek as well as the control to reset everything. They reset the planet, thus saving themselves and the world around them from certain “doom”.

It may seem like a radical upgrade to the story, but its “heart” is still intact. It’s still about choosing to change your destiny rather than becoming complacent and accepting what is handed to you. The only difference now is that when you find those opportunities that you were seeking, you can still choose to walk away and cut your losses, or you can choose to go that last step and “push the button”.

The changes in the story reflect what I’ve seen happen in the lives around me. I’ve seen person after person; take the same journey that I have, only to get scared to take that last step for fear of the unknown. People that for one reason or another decides to cut their losses and go fall into complacency. My story and its meaning urge those people to go that extra mile and push the reset button on their lives and see where it takes them.

It is all too often that we choose the familiar and safe route. We wake up many years down the road wondering why it didn’t go as planned. We make excuses to justify our lack of action. We tell ourselves, “that route… too expensive”, “that place… too far away”, “that idea… too risky.”

Instead we need to be bold. We need to refuse to settle for the mediocre and instead reach for the unreachable. And when we do that… when we seek out those things that we want most in the world, we find that we are not alone on that journey. Opportunity is right there with us. It finds us and rewards us for taking that risky, expensive, and far away route. All we have to do is be willing to do is reach for it.

My dream is coming true, but only because I made a choice to make it come true. I made the choice to forge my own destiny and build my own opportunities. I chose to take on my dreams instead of sitting idly by in the hopes that life will build them for me.

It is only because I acted like the character from my dream that I found my shining lake. I went out and searched for something better. And upon finding my reset button, I pushed it, and allowed the experience to change me for the positive.