A Wonderful World?- Personal Essay from Mortimer

                As I took my reflection time this morning, I realized that all I was thinking about were the negative things that had happened in the past several weeks.  I was betrayed by a person that I trusted, only to turn around and watch the evening news and see a story about a homeless man getting his face chewed off.  When I finished watching that, I got to work on a school assignment about children in Africa dying from disease and malnutrition.  But I wasn’t done with school for that day, so I got to work on my next assignment, which happened to be about American workers losing their jobs to outsourcing.

                But the bad news didn’t stop there.  One of my closest friends moved across the state, while another of my friends got angry at me for something that wasn’t my fault.  One of my friends hurt someone who serves as an inspiration for much of my poetry, and I don’t know how I can respect one of them and work with him after that happened.  My reputation is being attacked by people who don’t even know me, and my own friends won’t even listen to me when I tell them the truth.

                I continued pondering the depressing events of my life and my thoughts came to rest on last night’s newscast.  On it, I saw that two men that I had once seen commit a crime had been arrested for a violent murder in a city of only about 50,000 people.  I wondered if, had I reported them, I could have spared an innocent person’s life.

                Ironically, while I was pondering these and other unfortunate and depressing events in my recent life, I thought of the Louis Armstrong song, What a Wonderful World.  The writers of the song, Bob Thiele and George Weiss, paint a decidedly optimistic picture of the world, and point out everything good that they can find in the world around them.

                One stanza of the song particularly stuck out to me- “I hear babies cry and I watch them grow.  They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.  And I think to myself, ‘What a wonderful world’.”  This pulled my mind completely from my own problems and reminded me of the sibling I will be gaining this winter.  

                What will this unborn child’s life be like?  A thought occurred to me the moment I asked myself this question- that’s the wonderful part of it all.  If you break down the word wonderful, it doesn’t mean great, good or even decent.  It means “full of wonder.”  Full of mystery.  And with that realization, I saw the most beautiful thing about life.  To quote Forrest Gump’s mama, “You never know what you’re gonna get.”

                Maybe your life stinks right now.  Maybe it’s so bad that you think you can’t make it through whatever you’re dealing with.  The thing of it is, though, that you have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow.  Maybe it will only take one more day before things get better for you.  And maybe, just maybe, tomorrow you will wake up and realize how many people you have that care about you.  People that will hug you when you least expect it, be there when you need them and pick you up when you fall.  Don’t take those people for granted- they really care about you, and get hurt when you do.  Trust me on that one.

May you be spellbound,

Mortimer Micheals