Past

Who are you? I mean, who truly are you?

This question would be incredibly difficult to answer if the past did not exist. If the memories and life experiences we endured over the years were not remembered and engraved into our brains from adolescence. The past changes who you are in the future. It shapes you in the best of ways throughout your life, and you evidently would cease to exist without a heavy past.

Every single experience you endure has some small type of impact on you, even if you didn’t know it. It could be that one day your parents took you to the beach and you found a starfish and realized you wanted to peruse oceanography later in life.

It could be a super tragic death or loss, that created the stronger you, you are today. Whatever it may be, the way you are in this very moment, is because of these little life occurrences.

Whatever your past may be, whether it’s good or horribly bad, you learn with everything you do. You learn and learn and learn, and learn again. The memories you carry from the past shapes you.

Just remember that anytime you cringe at an embarrassing moment you had over the weekend, or wish that you could go back to the fondest of memories, it happened for a reason. Without a past, we would have no future. Just remember that.

— Bri Hageman, Staff Writer

Future

Over the years of our education, we often get asked that dreaded question from our teachers, “Where do you see yourself in twenty years?”

The question is redundant, because who can predict the future? I’ve always found myself coming back to that question over the years.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams,” and there is no doubt that I’m a dreamer.

My life and all of its glory is constantly moving forward into tomorrow and that requires me to plan as I move along with it. I am person who wants to see my goals getting accomplished, and by making that objective a reality, I dream big.

My dream is simple. I want to live every aspiring journalist’s dream and become a writer for a well-established job at a stellar multi-media publication firm and travel the world as I achieve many major successes by tackling the most hard-hitting of stories. That is the future that I’ll always be chasing, because that is where my ambitions lie.

Becoming whatever you want in this world doesn’t have to be a pipe dream. It can happen but you have to start living for the future. If you waste your life away by dwelling on the past because you’re unsure of what lies ahead, chances are your future doesn’t twinkle as bright as it should.

The past can’t be undone, so don’t get lost in it. Do better and be better as a result by focusing on what’s yet to come. Our future is full of endless possibilities and it’s up to us to take charge of it while we can.

Of course I imagine there are those people who are petrified of the vast unknown but the future, however shambolic, intricate, below par and startling it may be, should not be frowned upon, because unlike the past, it can be altered.

All we have to do is try.

— Sadie Sedlmayr, Staff Writer