My life story is best told through my experience with two roads: A dirt road out in a developing suburb of Dallas called Heath, Texas, and a congested concrete road within one of the toughest neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles—the Byzantine-Latino Quarter. Both roads have come to define who I am as an individual and what values I live by on a daily basis, and both roads have played a pivotal role in my aspirations to maximize my potential within my community and within the world. The juxtaposition of these contrasting roads signify my past, present, and future, and there is nothing more fundamental to my personhood then these roads that emblemize the two separate worlds that I have been lucky enough to be a part of in the 18 years I have been alive.
As a young boy in Heath, Texas, my friend, Dylan Nelson, and I would walk to a forest that was right next to his house on a dirt road that was covered with rocks, twigs, and horse manure, to go exploring. The road we walked on was darkish-brown and had a surrounding array of bluebonnets and a giant pond that never failed to glisten in the sunlight. The contrasting scenery between the road and its natural surrounding helped me realize the beauty of simple innocence, and I will never forget the way it made me feel. The dirt road was rugged and precarious with a variety of different size rocks, twigs, and splinters, but even though it was primitive and remote, I remember how connected I felt to the moment each and every time I walked down it. The experience was as if nothing else in my life mattered, and I felt the beauty of being one with the world as I walked passed all the blue bonnets with the twigs cracking at my feet. Today, I try to recreate this primitive state of fundamental consciousness through mindful meditation, but the feeling you get on a quiet road leading into a tree-covered forest is an un-paralleled experience that takes you to the most basic aspect of the human condition that cannot be recreated anywhere else—present awareness.
As an older teenager, I now live in downtown, Los Angeles, and I currently travel to school every day down a very different road than the dirt road I walked down in a Texas: A road called Pico Union. Instead of twigs, rocks, and horse manure, Pico is full of trash, dark grey concrete, and dirty sewer water; and instead of a surrounding array of blue-bonnets and a shining pond, Pico is surrounded by an array of clustered old buildings that house vacant and run-down businesses side by side. The simple innocence and the innate feeling of living in the present that I experienced on the dirt road in Heath has been replaced with the experience of hardship and a never-ending regret of what could have been that accompanies the depressed neighborhood that surrounds Pico. The poverty and anger that embodies the persona of the street never fails to make me think of how grateful I am to live in a world of security and opportunity--not contingent solely on daily survival but rather on freedom of choice and expression--and even though the situation for the people that live around Pico Union is bad and their lives are filled with helplessness, I see a sense of vitality in the children’s eyes that walk to school every day, a vitality that brings hope in even the darkest of moments, and it is this vitality that fuels my resilience and strengthens my desire to make a difference.
Some people only have the opportunity to experience one road their entire lives, but I have been blessed enough to have experienced many. The roads that we experience become a figment of who each and every one of us are and leave impressions that last a lifetime. To me, roads are a case for optimism: they show us that the strength of the human condition lies in exposure to the greater world and the endless oppertunities you can take from it.
