Blog #10-- I Believe

I believe in the beauty of humanity. I believe that everyone is capable of great good and great evil, great compassion and great cruelty-- and I believe that this combination, this ultimate paradox of life, is beautiful. Our very lives are flashes of brilliance, ecstasy or pain, and then they are extinguished. But not completely. We are never completely extinguished-- we live on, a faint afterglow, present on everyone we've affected, every life we've come into contact with. We can, indirectly, affect almost every single life on this planet-- our actions, our words influence others, and they in turn influence still more people. Whether good or bad, conscious or unconscious, we are constantly shaping each other.

For me, this was never clearer than when I became friends with a little girl named Hanna. Hanna was five years old, and she had Down's Syndrome. I know this is incredibly cliched, but... she was the most joyful, most inwardly and outwardly beautiful person I have ever met. She was, for a lack of better words, a little stinker-- but no one could ever get mad at her. She would flash a huge smile and have the whole room wrapped around her finger. Despite her Down's Syndrome, despite her difficulty speaking, she brought joy to everyone around her, and she was a better person than I could ever hope to be. I haven't seen Hanna in a little over two years-- I'll probably never see her again. But I will never forget her, and I can only hope that I gave her even a fraction of the happiness she gave me.

I'm afraid I sound horribly cliched and sentimental, but this is how I feel. This is what I believe in-- I believe that we live and laugh and cry and that it all ends with a final breath. I believe that there is nothing more beautiful than this.