Transcendentalism and Life Essay

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Jackie Gibson
English III
Mrs. Williams
21 January 2014
I Am Me, Who Are You? When I was little I was always trying to be just like my older brother, Garrett. I would even wear his baseball hat everyday to school. When I would be at school my teachers would ask me why I would always wear that ratty old baseball cap. The hat never bothered me, so why did anyone care why I wore it in the first place. My wearing that cap set me apart from everyone else. That is when I began to see the beauty of being “different”. The values of the Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, are valued in different ways. Anti-materialism, non-conformity, spiritually, solidarity, and the effects of nature are expressed in everyone's own individual ways. However, some people express these views in a very different way than others. Solidarity and nature go together in my eyes because they remindS me of certain times in my life that solidarity and the escape of nature helped me make it through another day. When life gets hard for certain people they react in various ways. When I was a young teenager I experienced a taste of how mean the world can be sometimes. It was when life got hard, that I understood the meaning of solidarity and how the necessity of fortitude is in play. I began to got to work as a 13 year-old girl and that is what grew the solidarity between my father and I. Going through the trials and tribulations as young as I did shaped me into the person I have become. Sitting in my backyard after a hard days work and talking with my father about how we are going to do certain things helped put many things int o perspective for us. Relaxing in the backyard and just listening to the whisper of the trees. Being in the nature helped both of us truly grasp what is and is not important in our everyday lives and being with the quintessence of nature helped shape my mind in certain ways. While the nature helped me see and think about what is and is not important in my life, anti-materialism is a key point in that scenario. Everyone goes through a rocky time in their life where they are forced to “make do” with what they have. This aspect of my life would get me into trouble and would also save us the trouble of doing some things. In my eyes, anti-materialism means to “make do” with what you have already. This ties back into the rocky times in life. If you are having trouble being able to buy something you desperately need, you have to improvise until you are able to upgrade. My father and I are the masters of improvising. When we did not have a certain tool and instead had a dearth of ability to go and purchase a tool that would solve our problem and prevent the chaos to come we had to become anti-materialistic. Non-conformity ties into this in a way that is quite interesting. When we would go to work there were not any heaters or air conditioners. Therefore, we would dress in a way that was pleasing to us and not to the rest of the world. My father and I have a rule that is as loud as the noon siren and it is that
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