Throwing Aside the Shackles :: Personal Narrative Essay Example

Throwing Aside the Shackles of "My" Life In the endless wanderings of social life comes no direction, no purpose, and a deep, spreading emptiness. Through the thoughts of others there is no innovation, and living the life proscribed and enacted by our descendants is the road to which we die empty, lost deaths, symbolizing nothing. From the society of others spring the thoughts and the actions of those by who the order was created. A man may live his entire life trudging through the drama as every other man does, and never think thoughts of his own, innovative or new. Yet in a short time nature peels away all that is proscribed, brushes off the shell that is the life of another, and soon enough a man may find that which is his own amidst the trained actions left behind. Nature is ever renewing, and ever new. Within a short time away from the wiles of eternally unaltering, eternally soothing technology, a man may discover that from within himself come circumspect thoughts, analyses of life, and conclusions unreached in the endless, pointless trail of society. For years I wandered through life, away from myself, alike in kind to the man beside whom I worked. In thought, in action, in all that I did I was like the hundreds before me, and the hundreds who will follow. The most original thing I ever thought to do was to flee it all, to throw aside the shackles of "my" life, with the knowledge that otherwise in years naught will have deviated from the state which it was in before I left. It was only upon coming, being with and of nature, that I began to realize how meaningless it had been, how my soul had cried out. It was only after my forced half of one hour deep in the heart of nature that I saw what was coming of my life, and realized that it was nothing. Like the drops of rain off the petals of a rose are the lives of men away from the pages of the book of life. Each comes and in itself may be beautiful, but it is exactly as the last. Shining dimly in the filtered sun, it drops away and is not remembered, as the next can be anticipated. Soon the rose is saturated, yet the drops continue to come, falling down the predetermined streams, creating nothing new.