It’s beneath that counts. Looks are deceiving.

"You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful and then you actually talk to them and five minutes later they're as dull as a brick? Then there's other people, when you meet them you think 'Not bad. They're okay.' And then you get to know them and their face just sort of becomes them, like their personality's written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful..."

“For in dreams we enter a world that is entirely our own”

Our dreams are essentially figments of our imagination, however despite how surreal some may be, they are real in the way they reflect how we may feel about something or even someone. Dreams are uncontrollable, ineffable and incoherent, however they still somehow make sense to us. Dreams have the ability to inspire us as they show us our potential and capabilities which we couldn’t have otherwise comprehended in true life. For instance, one may dream I become a successful Journalist (my wish) and this inspires me to yearn even more for this profession… Through the dream I experienced my happiness by watching events unfold.

Yes I agree dreams can be wacky and odd, however they shouldn’t just be dismissed as beneath the surface of our dreams we enter a world that is entirely our own and a world which no one else can quite comprehend. That’s what makes dreams individual… Each moment reveals another thing we never knew.

University

A BIG step in my life – in everyone’s life if they choose to apply. After many thoughts of where to apply, after many discussions of where’s best to apply, after research of different universities and after weighing up each… I have now sent of my UCAS application. Draft, after draft, after draft my Personal Statement is now out of my control and in the hands of my five choices to decide whether I’m a good enough applicant. Scared is not the word, I am petrified. Not only do I need offers, I need to achieve the grades at the end of A2 – pressure has never been so intense.

‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ by Mitch Albom

First of all I had reservations about this book as I have never read a book quite like it. I have also never come across any of Mitch Albom’s books before, despite being informed by a friend that his books are meaningful. Since reading ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’, I am intrigued to read Albom’s other books due to how ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ is written and the lesson which shone in the book.

The notion for ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ is

“All ending are beginnings. We just don't know it at the time..."

Eddie, who is the main character, is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park called ‘Ruby Pier’. As he grows older, he becomes more dissatisfied with his life, living a daily routine of work, loneliness, and regret. Out of the blue whilst at a ordinary day at work, an accident occurs where a cart falls from a ride endangering a young girl. Eddie attempts to save this girl, but dies himself on his 83rd birthday. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not what it is said to be, instead it is a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five different people who were in it. The quote stated above (“All endings are beginnings…”) resounds throughout the book as each person he meets makes him rethink his life and realise that the end of his life is just the beginning to finding out what went wrong, and that there’s still optimism.

There are quotes which I adore from this book, such as:

“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”

“When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole”

“”Strangers”, the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.””

“YOUNG MEN GO to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.”

“Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.”

“That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

Albom for me, gives an astonishing original story which has changed my outlook on afterlife itself and ultimately, the meaning of our life here on earth. The book not only teaches about treasuring life itself, but it is also a fable of love, a warning about war, and a nod of the cap to the real people of this world, the ones who never get their names in lights.

Other books by Mitch Albom:

• ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’
• ‘For One More Day’
• ‘Have a Little Faith’
• ‘The Time Keeper’ (his newest work)

Critical praise:

“Five meetings, five different and surprising truths that gradually unveil to Eddie one of the basic truths of life – that nobody is an island.”
—Knihovnice

"There's much wisdom here . . . An earnest meditation on the intrinsic value of human life."
—Los Angeles Times

“The Five People You Meet in Heaven confirms Mitch Albom as a writer of worship who can reach millions of readers for his courage to openly ask questions about our existence"
—El Mundo

Goodbyes

I read a quote the other day by the actress Joanna Lumley:

“Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room.”
 

To a certain extent, this quote seems rather ridiculous at face value, however metaphorically it makes sense. Naturally, we find it hard to say farewell to those who pass away whether it's with them beside us or from a distance. We all feel a sense of loss, compassion, empathy and emptiness. Our melancholy feelings are only normal as we journey through the stages of grief, until we reach the point where we accept that the one we love has gone, and that we'll never see them again, until (if you believe) the day will come when you'll meet them once again.

This quote for me, reinforces my own beliefs that the ones which pass away are next to us, and if not, very close to us. I know it sounds ludicrous, however, once someone has gone they're always going to be in the next room, until we take that step as they bravely did.

Such a lovely quotation from ‘Love Actually’

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.”

A year away...

For everyone my age, I am sure you can relate...

If I do go to university a year from now... I'll be travelling outside my comfort zone and what I know to be the normalities of life. These are: getting up at the same time each morning, going to sixth form, coming home to talk to my family and dinner with my family. Weekends - going to work, then seeing my family and perhaps friends. Life to me now is perfect as it is what I am used to, yes sixth form is hard, but what isn't in life? It scares me to know that just a year from now I could potentially be sitting in my own accommodation, or a library full of other students or even sitting in a cafe eating breakfast. And always on my mind I will be thinking with curiosity what the next lecture or seminar will be. That scares me. A year for me feels like a month. But I am scared that whilst I am there I will be feeling home sick, missing those who mean so much to me, and missing the random conversations with my friends, despite half of our talks not making sense, but to me they make total sense in my life. I'll miss my family's hugs and kisses and how they always tell me that I'm doing brilliantly and that I need more confidence, this is what kept me going.

But, I need to face it, we all need to. We are growing up now... Some of us eighteen already, others nearly. We need to step out of our comfort zone sooner or later, and earlier the better. The more comfortable we get, the more dependant we will become. So perhaps university is a positive thing not just in the case of a degree, but the experience of finding our own place in the world on our own. 

We still have time I suppose, it's a year from now. 

Time to get ready

Ever since year 9 I have worried about what the future will bring, however, I have come to realise that the future is unpredictable and only I can model my own future, no one else. I once read a quote by someone called Simone de Beauvoir:

“Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”

By this I have come to the conclusion that what I do today will leave its impression on the rest of my life… whether positive or negative. I have been ‘umm-ing and arr-ing’ about whether to go to university due to the cost, the worry of accommodation and whether it will benefit me in the long run, but I have decided that I am not going to gamble not getting a degree when the option is now open to me. So I am going to “act now, without delay”. I know I need to, I know myself too well and I know if I don’t I will regret it in the long run.

I have considered many universities and I still need to research a little bit more, but time is quickly passing. The universities I have read up on sound really good, but the entry requirements are quite high being AAB/ABB… It will be so difficult to get those grades, and I highly doubt I will. I may put them down as the aspirational option, and put lower universities in terms of entry requirements as realistic. I have come to realise A2 won’t be easy, I knew that straight from the start, but now I know what I want to achieve and where I want to go, I will try my absolute best to aim high and hopefully receive the grades that reflect this. I am ready for a hard year ahead, anyway, I was expecting it.

Achievement in other’s eyes

I have always wondered about achievement and other’s opinions about these, in this case grades. I have come to realise that praise is put on those who achieve the highest grades instead of those who performed on their target grade or even over their target grade. Surely praise is about congratulating someone who performed very well due to the circumstances they’re in. It is fair that ‘clever geniuses’ are praised for getting straight As, however what about those who overachieved or even done better than they ever hoped? For some people learning comes naturally to them, therefore they tend to do better so surely their achievement is expected or at least hoped for. I personally feel sorry for those who have done well despite finding things hard and always worrying; I know many people who are in this position,  however I feel they aren’t being praised as much for good grades compared to those who did ‘brilliantly’. This ‘brilliance’ is apparently only for those who get high grades. I read the newspaper the other day and it said about great achievers, not surprisingly these were straight A students. To me, it is not fair that people only read about students who are always achieving, what about those who have learning difficulties and those who exceeded their ability or even those who did well for themselves? Does our personal pride not come before other’s opinions?

Quotations I live by...

I write quotations I come across every day in a journal I own... Whether said by my friends, family, famous people or those which I have thought of myself.

1) Do you know every day is the first of the rest of your life.
2) Difficulties in the present are short-lived, the outcome is your life.
3) Each step is inadequate, until you reach the next.
4) Be a choice, a reason, a priority, but never an option.
5) Don't let your today be stolen by the unchangeable past or the indefinite future. Today is a new day.
6) What people think of you is none of your business.
7) Nobody gets to live life backwards. So, look ahead, that's where the future lies.
8) There's always someone. Even when there's no one.
9) You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
10) Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
11) Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
12) Nothing will work unless you do.
13) I don't believe you have to be better than anyone else. I believe you have to be better than you ever thought you could be.
14) All the motivation in the world means nothing when you don't believe in yourself.
15) Quitting is not giving up, it can be choosing to focus your attention on something more important.
16) The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
17) It's very important to choose for yourself what you think you could imagine for your life... No-one else works in your shoes.

I love quotations as they relate to every individual and all mean something despite who we are and where we come from and even what we believe.