Make sure you are keeping up to date with your Parts of Speech practice in NoRedInk - Test next Wed.
You NEED to read this piece!!!
This is a PERFECT example of 'inside and outside' writing. - Well done Sola!!!
Title: I Can See Everything
The sun is hitting the back of my neck, but I make sure to cover it with my hair. Then my hair gets hot, but I just let it be. If it’s a hot day, then so be it. I am walking to the MRT after swimming, and the straps of the bag I am holding are digging into my shoulders.
“Unh” I grunt as I start walking up the stairs of the bridge over the road. Out of habit, I looked down at my feet. I never know why I do it, or even how it looks from the outside. I just always watch my feet when I walk.
It makes me think of a time when I was about eight, and I was walking in an underground train station in Japan with my mom. I would keep looking at my feet, noticing the way my feet moved, the way one foot went in front of the other, then the next, and then the next.
“Look up, so you know where you’re going, and so you don’t bump into anything,” my mom said.
“Okay fine…” I mumbled in reply. I didn’t understand. If you looked up, then you would see only what was in front of you, and you might trip on something below you. But if you looked down, then you could see if anything was in front of you, because if there was, let’s say, a person in front of you, you would see the feet and legs of that person, so you’d know they were there. Unless… there was something floating in the air that you might bang your head into. I thought about as I walked, the announcer’s voice mixed in with the song of a train leaving, mixed in with the sound of a train in the background.
I just didn’t get it. I looked up quickly to make sure nothing was floating in the air for me to bump my head in, and took some time to glance at some other people. Most of them were looking up as they walked, and I just saw that as normal. There was this one person, though, who walked with his head down, and I thought to myself: he looks like such a sad person, and it looks so weird, why doesn’t he just look up and enjoy the view of the world?
And then I went back to watching my feet as I walked.
I am thinking about that time, seeing everyone as one species, and myself as another. I think about how if others look down as they walk, it was weird, but if I do, then its normal. Wait… I look down when I walk? Of course I do… but why didn’t I know that before? I realize, at that moment, that the way I see everything is different. Other people look down and make themselves look weird and sad and lonely. But I don’t look down, I watch my feet. All the time before that they were two completely different things. I never noticed.
And all at once, on that bridge over the road on the way to the MRT, I understand. People see me the way I saw the man at the underground train station. People see me as weird, sad, lonely. People see me as an introvert who doesn’t like to look up. True, I hate looking at people in the eyes, but that doesn’t make me sad and lonely. That just makes me a girl who watches her feet as she walks.
But I’m not the girl who watches her feet as she walks. I’m the girl who looks down as I walk. And I never knew they were really just the same thing. I thought, well actually, I never thought. I never really thought anything about my “looking down at shoes as I walk” thing. I never did. It was just normal. It was life.
With the new knowledge about my life, I decide to look up.
I can see everything. I can see the people’s faces walking around me, I can see the trees surrounding me, I can see the sun shining down on the world. I get a little dizzy and unstable, because I can’t see my feet, can’t see where I am stepping. But I can see where I am going. I can see the end of the bridge, the stairs down, the shop below it. I can see the rails of the bridge, the train station above, the roof of it too. I can see the beauty of the world. I can see everything.
Think about it. There are so many things in the world that we are doing and don't even know — some good, some bad. And sometimes we judge others for doing things that we do without knowing. We as humans and as people are just all one big mystery, like a pearl at the bottom of the ocean, safe and sound and far enough away that nobody can truly get to it. Of course, we find fake pearls all over, pretending they are ours, pretending that we found it, but our real pearl is too far. Nobody will ever reach their pearl, but every realization, every observation, and everything we learn ourselves will get us closer to the bottom of the ocean, closer to our pearl, and that is what we really need. As long as we are closer to the pearl, we have more understanding of what we are and more importantly, who we are.
Video Mentor - Watch this for inside and outside writing. What symbols are also reinforcing meaning?
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