One of my favorite shows ever created is "One Tree Hill." Being from North Carolina, I'm proud to say that the show was filmed at our beautiful coast in Wilmington. If you're familiar with the show, then you know all about the heartbreak in every season (almost in every episode), and how much you wanted to be apart of it yourself. OTH was one of the most addicting shows ever to watch and I wish more shows like this were still around. It was a show that focused on life lessons instead of the supernatural and unrealistic shows that are all over TV today. Yes, some of the story lines in OTH aren't that realistic (like how everyone - literally everyone - is famous somehow, and there are 17-year-olds living in a house by themselves), but that doesn't take away the fact that "One Tree Hill" taught many life lessons such as these:
1. Ignore Others, Focus On You.
This is seen pretty much throughout several seasons and with different characters, but it's one of the earliest lessons in the show. It appears early in OTH in the first few episodes when Lucas joins the basketball team. We know that Lucas and Nathan are half brothers and have a feud going on at the very beginning, and we watch Nathan torment Lucas so he won't join the team. It's when Nathan is at his absolute worst, but despite that, Lucas does what he wants and joins, even after beating Nathan in a game of one-on-one. Lucas becomes one of the best players on the team besides Nathan, and if he would've let Nathan win and not joined, then Lucas never would've played the sport he loves and his relationship with Nathan would still be non-existent.
2. Your Actions Have Consequences.
We can all guess where this one is going: Dan murdering his brother, Keith, in the school hallway. That was one of the biggest plot twists in the show that never went away. Dan Scott was on every season of OTH and after he confessed to killing his brother (which took forever), everyone hated him even more. Dan was already the villain of the show, but once this came out, it was game over for him. He went to jail and once he was released, he spent the rest of the show trying to make it up to his family. No one wanted to speak to him anymore, and Nathan and Haley even told their son Jamie that Dan was dead when he asked. Sure, Dan saved Jamie and Nathan in the show, but that never excused the pain he caused on his family for killing one of the sweetest people Tree Hill ever had. This taught us that your actions have consequences and if you're not careful, those consequences can follow you throughout your entire life.
3. Hard Work Pays Off.
Brooke owning her own clothing company at 22, Nathan making it to the NBA, Lucas becoming a best selling author... can I have their motivation? Every character in OTH makes it big somehow, but I think the biggest success story is Brooke Davis. Nathan was NBA bound from the start, that was a God given ability for him, but Brooke on the other hand had to find her talent and she found it in season 3. She starts working on a clothing line in Haley's apartment by opening an online store with her sketches as a way of trying to mend her broken heart. People start ordering them like crazy and pretty soon at 18, she's got her own company: Clothes Over Bros. When season 5 rolls around and we see the first life of the characters after college, we see Brooke as this extremely rich fashion designer, living in New York. Brooke made it big and is the perfect example that hard work pays off, no matter what your age is.
4. Relationships Are Messy.
Everyone in OTH cried over every relationship. There was a love triangle between Brooke, Lucas and Peyton, Haley left Nathan in season 2 to go on tour with Chris Keller, Brooke and Julian went through a rough split... the relationship drama was endless. But that's what kept us watching...
5. But You Fight For The One You Love.
If Nathan and Haley can make it, anyone can make it. Enough said.
6. You Never Know What People Are Going Through.
Jimmy Edwards bringing a gun to school and committing suicide was one of the most powerful episodes on the show. Jimmy was barely a character and only on the show not even a handful of times before that episode. This just goes to show that everyone is fighting an inward battle that we don't know about it, and it's only fair to show love and kindness to everyone, you never know who needs it the most.
7. Everyone Has A Past.
Julian got the damaged, former-slut Brooke Davis who was hard to love. He had to realize that she was trying so hard to not be the girl she used to be, and it took them both a while to understand that. Clay was hard to let love in when he met Quinn. Clay's past marriage was another major plot twist in the show because the last thing we all expected was for him to have a wife that died... and a kid?! Once we saw what happened to Clay's wife, it was easier to understand why he was hard for Quinn to love. Patience is a virtue and sometimes we need to be patient with the ones we love, there's a reason for everything.
8. Never Forget Where You Come From.
You are who you are, thanks to where you come from.
9. Friendship = Everything.
Forget the marriages, if it weren't for the character's friends, then they would've never survived. We all need friends in our lives to pick us up when we need them the most, just like they need us for the same reason.
There are soooooooooo many more lessons to take away from the show that it's impossible to highlight them all. All in all, "One Tree Hill" is a show about life, love and loss. Let's pray that there's a reunion show coming our way in the near future.
