Life

IB Class: English

How should we live our life? Should we always be happy or should we experience both sadness and pleasure in life?

Obviously, in reality, we can't just experience happiness. We suffer, cry, and be angry. As if experiencing negative emotions in our life isn't enough, in English class, we almost always learn about tragedies. We read poems by Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, read 1984, read Of Mice and Men, study Hamlet, and study Antigone. All of these are tragedies. If it is human instinct to be happy, why do we learn about people's sufferings? Some of us even suffer alongside with the fictional characters. 

A cliched idiom in Mandarin states that "we have to lose then only we learn how to value". Unfortunately, many of us do not know how fortunate we are, until we lose what we used to have. When we lose, we suffer. When we regain what we used to have, even if it is the same amount, we experience more happiness, because we now know how valuable it is. This shows that after experiencing sadness, pleasures in life become more pleasurable. If we have only experienced happiness, happiness would not be something valuable, and we might even take happiness for granted.

Yes, the poems of Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson are tragic. Because of them, I learnt that I am a fortunate person because I am not so depressed that I have to write poems to release my emotions. I lead a happy life.

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