I was sitting in my second Creative Writing Theory class listening to our animated lecture about Greek Mythology when my professor pressed the question of: “What is the Pandora’s Box of your life?”
After hearing this, I was stumped when trying to think of what has tempted me in the past. I could hardly recall any material thing like Pandora's Box that has made me open up the said “evil” emotions of the world, as the myth tells.
My professor pressed on, saying, “Has it been a relationship? Knowing damn well you shouldn’t be with this person, but you fall for them anyways?” At this point in class, emotions flooded over me--flashbacks of you, the apprehension I felt early on, and the refusal of fate I tried to combat for so long as I fought for our relationship.
What I have learned is this: you cannot refute your destiny, someone else’s destiny, and your place in their destiny.
Relationships will run their course, friendships will end, and the box will open full of despair lined with hope that "this" was the last time it will happen.
Likely it is far from the last time, since we as humans are so deeply curious in nature; however, we must work relentlessly in pursuing our own destinies so that our place in the universe is validated by our will to survive, despite the number of times Pandora’s Box may open in front of us by our own doing.
Pandora opened the box with her very own hands, just as our choices are metaphorically the hands opening the boxes of our lives.
We find ourselves at cross roads in life in which we must make choices, and often these choices become who we are. In the bestselling novel, “If I Stay” by Gale Foreman, she writes: "Sometimes we make choices in life, and sometimes choices make you."
Everything you do throughout the day is a choice, including the foods we eat, the people we interact with, the shoes we wear as we rush out the door, and bigger decisions like where we decide to go to college, or what cities we consider jobs for later in life.
While some of these decisions may have caused us pain due to the shortcomings of things we once desired, the silver-lining of pain is hope.
Grouped in with all of the suffering in Pandora’s Box, hope is what keeps humanity moving. It is what inspires each of us to wake up every morning, make our bed, and make the choices that we do. Hope keeps us moving, and without it, we arguably would have no motivation to move forward.
Hope is that subconscious feeling during hard times that keeps our minds thinking: “It can get better than this.”
We act on that belief by telling ourselves that it will get better than the situation we are in. The people that come into our lives to redirect us on our path towards our destiny may leave. It will hurt like the contents of Pandora’s Box itself; although, we will find ourselves in the same situations again.
We will have our hands on Pandora’s Box, human curiosity pulling us to open that box while telling ourselves, maybe, just maybe, the contents of the box won’t hurt us this time.
