Naivety in a child is normal. In an adult it is worrisome. To be young again would be a blessing. The cares of the young revolve around challenges like what color crayon to choose for a drawing or which part of the playground to start to play in and explore. Ignorance is bliss, but sometimes ignorance is just ignorance. Let’s backtrack a little bit to the playground. Try to remember the creaking of the swings as you pumped your legs hard to swing higher and higher as the wind flew through your hair. Remember the many squealing children running up to the top of the slide and then happily slipping to the bottom screaming, “again, again!” Picture the merry-go-round with a group of children running around it attempting to hop onto its surface. It whirls around at what seems like top speed; some children make it on while others fall to the side still laughing without concern. These children do not understand but this is a symbol of their future lives, an endlessly whirring merry-go-round.

Around and around and around it goes but where it stops nobody knows. False. We know but we do not want to admit it. On some subconscious level, we all know this. We think we are different, special even. We think that we have strayed away from the pack and taken the road less traveled. Think about it this way. You go to lower school to get to upper school, you go to upper school to go to University. You go to University to go to Graduate school or get a job. At your job, you work from nine to five then go home, go to sleep, and start all over again. I realize that there are some jobs that do not follow this program and there are also some people that do not follow this program either. What I am saying here is that we have set up our country in such a way that success is predicted for those who get on and stay on the merry-go-round. There are many forms of intelligence in the world and the American program doesn’t let everyone succeed. There are brilliant people in the world that go through school and struggle. They are the hands-on people; they are brilliant but they get put down and told you can’t do it that way. They are told to listen in class, take notes, and fill in little bubbles on a piece of paper. This is not how they learn. They likely can’t survive on the corporate merry-go-round. They are the one’s who get flung off and deemed incompetent. They are just the opposite. Different measures of intelligence and success should be respected in addition to the traditional. It often seems that there is only one merry-go-round where you make money in this country; it is how you become successful.

As to how to get off the merry-go-round, I am not sure but I know that we need to treasure the one’s who don’t fit the status quo. Learn from the introverts, the artists, and the seemingly weak or unusual. In the end, there are endless ways to measure success. Picture the wind blowing through your hair as you run around in a circle desperately trying to catch a handle to pull yourself up onto the spinning metal contraption. Imagine the screaming children and creaking equipment. Then imagine how it has changed, a long time ago you were trying to get onto the merry-go-round, and today you need to get off. We can’t judge success based on who makes it onto the merry-go-round. Naivety as a child is normal; as an adult it is worrisome.