Can Life Be truly Planned and Lived in all Certainty - Admission/Application Essay Example

Life is full of surprise and uncertainty that can disrupt the best laid plans. Discussion Right from the very moment we are born, we are trying to determine our place and worth in society. There are people, even toddlers, of every temperament and you would find leaders and followers even in the kindergartens and the playgrounds of our schools. The fact is that we learn from the environment around us and our parents and family are our first teachers. We pick up much of our living style and fighting spirit from the home- or maybe it’s in our genes.

However, circumstances can intervene and disrupt life and make a man or a mouse out of us. It depends how we react to bullying for example. The Last American Man of Elizabeth Gilbert’s description would certainly not fall for this. He would stand up and fight and summarily dispatch the opposition. This manly man is one with nature and can stand up to the elements. Eustace Conway shunned city life to live in the jungle in a tepee and is the epitome of the 19th century naturalist cowboy. No doubt his ruggedness would appeal to some women, but they would be taken aback by the fact that he would like to make all the decisions.

A woman’s place is in the home, making and looking after the family while he hunts and supports them (Gilbert, 2002, 6). Moving forward to Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun (2009), it is again the story of the ordeal that a Muslim family had to go through in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans in August 2005. Our protagonist Abdulrahman, his wife Kathy and their four kids lived in New Orleans and had real estate investments there. While Kathy and the kids were put out of harm’s way, moving to Baton Rouge, Abdulrahman decided to stay on and also helped neighbors and other members of the community.

In return for this, he and three friends were arrested on 21 September 2005 by the local police and National Guard, transferred temporarily to a Greyhound bus as a makeshift prison and later put under detention for as much as 40 days without any explanation and then freed. It was a real ordeal for mother and kids as she was not told anything- to her it appeared that he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. In retrospect, it appears that he was arrested because of his being a Muslim. Kathy’s family had also never supported her decision to convert to Islam and her dress was the subject of ridicule as she went about in public.

We cannot have this state of affairs in American society. Looking at David Wallace’s view in’ How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart’ (2001), the author is taken aback when he realizes upon reading her autobiography that she is quite human after all. His high opinion of her comes crashing to the ground as he sees that she is having the most mundane and ordinary thoughts even as she defeats Chris Evert at the US Open Championships in 1988 (Wallace, 2001, 1). He is forced to concede that the greatness of world class tennis players may be visible only on the courts as they play their game.

He was also amazed to note that even money does not seem to matter after a point-like when the sponsors of a Japanese tournament had to lure Austin in with free airline tickets for her family after she had ignored their earlier requests and offers of even $100,000 just to participate. Again in ‘This is Water’ David Wallace cautions the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon University not to be afraid to experiment