I had the idea for this piece because my mum sent me a poster listing the Dalai Lama's 'Instructions for Life'. I knew that I wanted to the piece to end with my suggestions of similar instructions, but ones written by a young person for a young person because this is not something that I have seen done before; most wisdom is passed from older generations to younger ones.
I was having difficulty trying to find an opening to piece because I didn't want to jump straight into questioning why wisdom is only passed down generations instead of up or horizontally!
When playing 'would you rather' with my friends, and someone posed the question 'would you rather skip 10 years into the future or 10 years back in the past?' I knew it would be the perfect way to lead into my column this week. I have to say I was surprised to find so many of my friends had regrets, and more suprised by the fact that when I actually stopped to think I realised I had regrets as well.
I did not want this piece to be comical because I did not feel comfortable trying to make light of the fact that people my age already have regrets about their relatively short lives to date. I decided to compose 10 'instructions' because I felt that 5 were not enough, but the 19 from the Dalai Lama were too many.
I created the instructions by thinking about the things I regret, or wish that I hadn't worried about so much, on the assumption that other young people worry about similar things. I did not want the instructions to be really deep and meaningful about life, in the way that an adult would, instead I wanted to make them simple and directly relatable to the lives of teenagers today.
I am really happy with the piece, particularly because it was a change of pace from my usual, sarcastic mocking columns.
No comments:
Post a Comment