Thoughts on Life's Changes

Life's Changes-The Things They Carried

It's now 1990. I'm forty-three years old, which would've seemed impossible to a fourth grader, and yet when I look at photographs of myself as I was in 1956, I realize that in the important ways I haven't changed at all. I was Timmy then; now I'm Tim. But the essence remains the same. I'm not fooled by the baggy pants or the crew cut or the happy smile—I know my own eyes—and there is no doubt that the Timmy smiling at the camera is the Tim I am now. Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging. The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow. (236)

As we can see by this passage, Tim O'Brien feels that the important qualities of a person usually remain constant throughout the years; these qualities are the true essence of a person, their soul, and how they live their life. "Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging". What he means when he says this is that the spiritual, not the physical qualities of a person that usually remain constant as time goes on. The implications in this passage are ideas that I qualify with...I would find it very difficult to either agree/disagree with this statement. I believe it to all depend on different situations of different people. For example: a certain person may have a similar personality throughout their entire life, but it is possible to find a person that may have had a negative demeanor when young, and as they grew older, they matured and therefore became a better person. I also believe that a person's characteristics are based on how they want to act, and also on their morals, and what they value as important qualities.

If I was to look at my own growth as a person, it would be an easy task to pick out what has changed about me, but the essential thing to remember is to distinguish what changes are important, and what changes are trivial. I would like to think that as I grew older, my characteristics such as kindness, and dedication, stated constant, but of course, there were some things that did change, such as my level of thinking, and my understanding of societal morals. So as stated before, I feel that how you change in life is more of a result of where you want you life to head, rather than where you let your life lead.

"The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice..." I really like this image of eternity, as this is an accurate example of how life continues on in an infinite circle of occurrences. I feel that because human life goes on so constantly that there are so many opportunities for it to change in many ways, and that is why these changes cannot be predetermined...because there ares so many possibilities that lie ahead.

When talking about life's changes, I can easily think about myself as a child in elementary and myself as a high school student. I feel that throughout my entire life I have maintained relatively the same personality...however, one thing that I have noticed that has changed about myself is my appreciation for life. As a younger student, I often worried myself sick over grades and what "could-be" rather than what was happening at that moment. Now,I can take great pride in the fact that I have overcome his flaw, and I have now learned not to sweat the small stuff in life, and to enjoy it because it DOES go by so quickly.

Maybe I would not have been as fortunate, and would have never overcome this flaw...This again proves the reality that the same does not happen to all as their life goes on. I feel that the most important thing to remember as life goes on is the fact that life is what you make of it, and take out of it.

Why Frank McCourt Writes

I write because my words are true...as true as the pint that often slid through the lips of my father, as true as the permanence of death, as I watched small, white boxes enter the ground. I write because my thoughts are like the dying embers of the fire that we barely were able to stoke, containing a heat, light, delicate, and pure, but still remaining strong. My words wind around the raven ringlets of my sister Margaret's hair, dancing along the whispers of poverty, and then floating to heaven. I write because my mother's soul was not a tainted one, it was a frightened one...living each life of her day in worry, deceit, anger, and fear. I write because I want to say thank-you to the Angel on the Seventh Stair, and to send a reminder to God to take care of my siblings, and my family. I wish for my family's story to be told, and I promise you, in no way is this ego-ism. There is nothing to be egotistical about. When I was a child, the 'souls' on my shoes were a luxury. Because I have walked on so many paths, I have probably gained more I could think of. When I was a child, I definitely was not rich with money or material things, but undoubtedly, I was rich with the stars that shone every night, the dust of the roads I have traveled, the crumbs of the coal salvaged, and the dry ground in "Italy". But I have a confession to make: the words on my pages are not words at all, they are the eyes, the hands, the feet...the entire being of McCourt. I hope that you, my readers do not feel deceived in any way...but I thought that you deserved to know that my words are not words...they are an entity of a family, a soul, a loss, suffering, and a fight just to live. In my childhood, money was not an easy thing for us to come by, it was something as rare as a blue moon, but I feel that my ability to write has made me wealthier and any other man in the world. I write because I believe the past is a very important thing to remember. Whether a past has been negative, or positive, it is important that it remains and sustains. I tell my past, because I am sure that there are others in the world that have lived one like it. I hope that my past, that my story, could maybe, just maybe help others to heal the past they had once lived. I write not only just to help others heal, but it helps me to heal myself as well. I write so that the souls of children can be remembered, so that the hungry could possibly be fed, so that everyplace could always be Italy, so that the barefoot can be relieved, so that the harmed could be sheltered, so that the poor may be rich, so the sick could be healthy, and so the sad, could be happy again.
AMERICA is my PEN, and IRELAND is my PAPER.

I write because it is my life, it is my passion...I write because I want to be a teacher, so I can teach others what I have learned, inside, and outside of school, and I want to teach what people true factors of life, and the reality of a harsh past. I want to honor my mother, my family, even though, it may not have been perfect. I write because I want to shun every ounce of alcohol that was ever in my father's blood, but I want to rejoice every once of blood, every beat of the heart, that nevertheless, still remained.