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Do things at your own pace. life's not a race - quote and reflection.

DO THINGS AT YOUR OWN PACE: LIFE'S NOT A RACE

In today's fast-paced world, it is easy to get caught up in the rat race, constantly striving to achieve more, accomplish goals, and keep up with others. However, in this pursuit, we often forget the significance of moving at our own pace. Life is not a race, but a journey of self-discovery and growth. In this article, we will explore the importance of embracing your own pace, the benefits it brings, and practical ways to do so.

If you want to see 37 Quotes That Will Inspire You to Overcome Challenges click here

Understanding the Pressure to Keep Up

In a society that values productivity and competition, there is immense pressure to keep up with the expectations of others. The fear of falling behind and the desire to succeed can lead to burnout, anxiety, and dissatisfaction. It's essential to recognize that each individual has a unique path to follow, and comparing oneself to others can be detrimental to personal growth.

Embracing the Journey of Self-Discovery

Instead of focusing solely on the destination, it is vital to appreciate the journey of self-discovery. Life presents numerous opportunities for learning and personal development, and each experience contributes to our growth. Embracing your own pace allows you to savor these moments, helping you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you.

The Benefits of Moving at Your Own Pace

a. Improved Mental Well-Being: By avoiding the constant pressure to keep up with others, you can reduce stress and anxiety. Embracing your own pace allows for a more relaxed and content mindset.

b. Enhanced Productivity: Surprisingly, moving at your own pace can enhance productivity. When you focus on what truly matters to you, you can prioritize tasks and work more efficiently.

c. Fulfillment and Satisfaction: By setting realistic goals and achieving them at your own pace, you'll experience a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.

Overcoming External Expectations

Society often imposes expectations on us, such as getting a high-paying job, starting a family, or achieving specific milestones by a certain age. However, it's crucial to remember that these expectations might not align with your unique desires and aspirations. Learning to overcome external pressures and defining your own path is essential in living a fulfilling life.

Cultivating Self-Compassion

As you embrace your own pace, it's essential to practice self-compassion. Be kind to yourself and recognize that it's okay to face challenges and setbacks. Treat yourself with the same level of understanding and support that you would offer to a friend. Self-compassion fosters resilience and allows you to bounce back stronger after difficulties.

Setting Realistic Goals

Setting realistic goals is a key component of living life at your own pace. Break down your ambitions into smaller, achievable steps, and celebrate each milestone along the way. This approach will help you stay motivated and prevent feelings of overwhelm.

Learning to Say No

In a fast-paced world, it's easy to get caught up in numerous commitments. However, it's important to remember that you can't do everything, nor should you. Learning to say no to activities or responsibilities that don't align with your priorities is essential in creating a balanced and fulfilling life.

Seeking Support from Like-Minded Individuals

Surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals who appreciate the concept of living life at their own pace can provide invaluable support. Joining communities or support groups focused on personal growth and self-discovery can be uplifting and empowering.

Things get easier when you realize life is not a race!

To sum up, embracing your own pace is a transformative approach to life. Recognize that life is not a race but a beautiful journey filled with experiences, growth, and self-discovery. By understanding the significance of moving at your own speed, you can experience improved mental well-being, enhanced productivity, and a deeper sense of fulfillment. Let go of external expectations, set realistic goals, and cultivate self-compassion as you embark on this liberating journey. Remember, life is meant to be savored, not rushed. So, take a step back, breathe, and embrace the beauty of living life on your terms.

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“Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.”  ~Chuang Tzu

At an early age I learned that nothing in life is guaranteed. When I was eleven years old, a close friend and classmate lost his battle with cancer. After that, I had several more instances of losing loved ones , some expected, others not so much.

After having gone through so much loss at such an early age, my outlook on life was one word: rushed .

I wanted to get through college as fast as I could, while taking on as much as I could. I wanted to have meaningful relationships and foster my athletic abilities. I wanted to get out into the real world and have a great job where I felt like I mattered, and made a difference .

I had graduated college a semester early, and I was blindsided by how seemingly cold the real world was and by the fact that I had all of these dreams with little to no understanding as to how they were going to come to fruition— as fast as possible .

After all, time was of the essence because I could die tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that… (What twenty-something year olds think like that?)

With the economy on the decline, I was only able to find a job at a nearby hospital as a transportation aide. This basically entailed bringing patients to and from their appointments within the hospital.

While I did enjoy certain aspects of this job, such as trying to make each and every person I transported smile during their otherwise not-so-great day, the attitudes of fellow hospital staff left me feeling worthless, as I was mocked by physicians and nurses for no other reason than my job title.

As months crept on, I became seriously devastated at the thought of my future success being delayed any further. It was hard to feel like success was on the horizon when those who were supposed to be my “teammates” were treating me so poorly.  I was genuinely distraught over the uncertainty of what tomorrow was going to bring.

I tried my very best to trudge on, with the sole thought and hope that “surely another career wouldn’t be like this, right?”

About six months later I was offered a different job. It wasn’t exactly like my previous one, but left me feeling once again like I was on another rollercoaster ride, this time with a healthcare consulting company.

When I was offered this position that would have me relocating to Pennsylvania, I packed my bags as quickly as I could. I seized the moment , not knowing when another opportunity would present itself.

In this position I had effectively transitioned from a job that required direct interaction with patients, to a role that was focused on how hospitals and medical groups financially managed themselves.

While my previous critics during my time as a transportation aide would have deemed this job title more favorable, this consulting position did not leave me feeling any better at the end of the day.   

Now, I was boots-on-the-ground implementing change within an organization, with one major problem: my boss was one of the most despised people at the hospital.

This left me putting out fires at every turn, and put me in a position where I felt forced to back certain causes I didn’t truly believe in because I was told to “step up, or step out,” by the management within the consulting company.

During this time, I was spending ten to twelve hours a day at work, getting nothing more in return than feeling emotionally and mentally drained at the day’s end.

While I did have a small group of friends in the area, I wasn’t close to any of them, as this group of individuals primarily focused on surface-level relationships and drinking.

To fill any remaining time I had available to me, I began training for an Olympic distance triathlon.

More or less, I threw all of the things that I felt I needed to achieve to feel happy in life up in the air, hoping at least one would catch, but none of them did.

My failure in this approach was that I was running—not just in a “hey, I’m training for an Olympic distance triathlon” kind of way, but in an “oh-my-gosh, I’m terrified to leave any amount of time free because if I truly take a step back and look at my life, I will realize how unhappy I am and how unimportant all of this is” kind of way.

I was cramming my days so full in an attempt to truly experience the world like my other friends and family members never had the chance to, and in doing this, I wasn’t actually experiencing anything at all.

I didn’t know who I was , and I most certainly didn’t know what I wanted.

Fast forward a year and a half and here I am, now located in Boise, Idaho, where I have relinquished “striving for happiness,” because happiness is not something you strive for.

When I moved to Idaho for another job opportunity, I decided not to fill all my downtime like I had in the past.

At first, I felt truly and utterly alone. Things were quiet, and it became apparent that in trying to experience everything around me and check items off of my bucket list, I had neglected to cope with several past experiences.

The loss of loved ones, the ending of relationships, and past decisions that did not suit me all haunted me in my downtime.

Through counseling and deep self-reflection over the past several months, I have been able to resolve many of these feelings and have learned, among other things, that happiness is something that already lies within us.

It is a personal choice, however, whether or not we allow ourselves to feel it.

I believe happiness is choosing to let go of those situations and people who do not suit us personally. It is living in the moment, rather than, in my case, living in fear that the moment is going to be over before I’m ready.

It is here that I have allowed myself to only invest time in what truly interests and suits me, rather than what I feel obligated to achieve.

I have made time to enjoy exercising, to cherish my family and friends, to read and write, and to enjoy the simplicity of life rather than stress over all of life’s complexities. In realizing how much I have missed while running from my past and planning far into the future, I have become truly present.

We all have the ability to enjoy our lives, but it can’t happen if we’re racing toward the future. If we want to be happy, we have to choose to create happiness now.

Photo by rusticus80

About Lauren Baratto

Lauren Baratto is a twenty-four year old self-proclaimed “old soul,” who strives to impact the lives of others through consistently exercising compassion, and empathy. Overly enthusiastic about the healthcare field and helping others, Lauren’s ultimate passion is writing and while she doesn’t have a blog or book just yet… she hopes to in the future….. STAY TUNED and connect at: facebook.com/lauren.bee53

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do. Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

About the Author

PAULA M. L. MOYA, is the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford University. She is the Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and a 2019-20 Fellow at the Center for the Study of Behavioral Sciences.

Moya’s teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, American cultural studies, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicanx and U.S. Latinx studies.

She is the author of  The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism  (Stanford UP 2016) and  Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles  (UC Press 2002) and has co-edited three collections of original essays,  Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century  (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010),  Identity Politics Reconsidered  (Palgrave 2006) and  Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism  (UC Press 2000). 

Previously Moya served as the Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature, Vice Chair of the Department of English, Director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and also the Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. 

She is a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, the Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. She has been a Brown Faculty Fellow, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a Clayman Beyond Bias Fellow. 

Thoughts To Inspire

Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way.

Each minute of our life is a lesson but most of us fail to read it. I thought I would just add my daily lessons & the lessons that I learned by seeing the people around here. So it may be useful for you and as memories for me.

Life is not a Race to WIN… Life is like a Journey , to ENJOY every moment. We are running through life so fast that we forget not only where we have been but also where we are going.

There is no reward for completing the race my friend. Please run at your own speed and run how you like it.

Don’t try to run other’s race. It is your own race run how you like it.

Stop worrying about the consequences. Live in the present, share the glory of being a part of this race. No amount of gold, silver or money will or can compensate what you will miss if you try to rush things and miss the very essence of running.

Don’t just run for the sake of running because running is important and not the race!!

Do not undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others. It is because we are different that each of us is special. Do not set your goals by what other people deem important. Only you know what is best for you. Do not take for granted the things closest to your heart. Cling to them as you would your life, for without them, life is meaningless. Do not let your years slip through your fingers by living in the past, nor in the future. By living your life one day at a time, you live all the days of your life. Do not give up when you still have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying. Do not be afraid to encounter risks. It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave. Do not shut love out of your life by saying it is impossible to find. The quickest way to receive love is to give love; the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly. Do not dismiss your dreams. To be without dreams is to be without hope; to be without hope is to be without purpose. Do not run through life so fast that you forget not only where you have been, but also where you are going.

We have born and brought up in society, where we were prepared to compete with others – your fellow mates and friends. 

The seed had planted when you were at school. The pressure of scoring highest marks, the pressure of performing well in sports, the weight of getting admission into a renown college, getting a good job and again getting into an unhealthy competition at the workplace.

Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way.

When you were in college, you wanted a job.

When you got a job in service-based company, You wanted product-based.

When you got 6 LPA package, you wanted 10 LPA.

When you got 15 LPA, You wanted 30 LPA.

When you got 40 LPA CTC, you wanted 40 LPA Fixed.

When you got 50 LPA fixed, You wanted to build a startup.

When you got successful in that, you wanted early retirement.

When you retired early, you wanted unlimited passive income.

When you got everything you ever wanted, You wanted time to enjoy it.

Hence, time is your most valuable asset and it cannot be equated with your earnings. Enjoy your 20s and 30s by both working hard and playing hard. Feel the satisfaction of hitting milestones. The finish line is not really important.

Achieve your own goals ( Not society’s expectations ). You don’t need to prove anything to anyone but yourself.

Nobody is measuring you, they are busy in their lives. You are the only opponent to yourself in this battle.

Running towards the next fulfillment will never be able to find peace in life. It will only lead us distant away from what we’re hoping to feel.

The only way to win the race of life is to realize that, there is no race.

Winning has to be from within us. We need to find happiness within ourselves. True satisfaction can only be observed from inside.

Life is not a race or competition. It’s a journey. Don’t just run after aiming at the finishing line, rather enjoy the ride.

Please feel free to share your story and any lessons you learned, you experienced, you came across in your life in the comments below. If you enjoyed this, or any other other posts, I’d be honoured  if you’d share it with your family, friends and followers!

If you wish to follow my journey outside of my writing, you can find me on Facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/MunnaPrawin ) Instagram( MunnaPrawin ) and Twitter( @munnaprawin1 )

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Posted by MunnaPrawin on July 1, 2021 in Experiences of Life. , Life & It's Importance

Tags: life , life is a journey , Life is not a race , Life is short , life is valuable , MunnaPrawin , ShanvikaPrawin

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Reference Information

Author: .

Essays and Commentary

Reflections and analysis inspired by the killing of George Floyd and the nationwide wave of protests that followed.

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She longed for black people in America not to be forever refugees—confined by borders that they did not create and by a penal system that killed them before they died.

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How do we change america.

The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone.

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The purpose of a house.

For my daughters, the pandemic was a relief from race-related stress at school. Then George Floyd was killed.

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June 25, 2020

The players’ revolt against racism, inequality, and police terror.

A group of athletes across various American professional sports have communicated the fear, frustration, and anger of most of Black America.

September 9, 2020, until black women are free, none of us will be free.

Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective.

July 20, 2020, john lewis’s legacy and america’s redemption.

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Race and Ethnicity

Race is a concept of human classification scheme based on visible features including eye color, skin color, the texture of the hair and other facial and bodily characteristics. Through these features, humans are ten categorized into distinct groups of population and this is enhanced by the fact that the characteristics are fully inherited.

Across the globe, debate on the topic of race has dominated for centuries. This is especially due to the resultant discrimination meted on the basis of these differences. Consequently, a lot of controversy surrounds the issue of race socially, politically but also in the scientific world.

According to many sociologists, race is more of a modern idea rather than a historical. This is based on overwhelming evidence that in ancient days physical differences mattered least. Most divisions were as a result of status, religion, language and even class.

Most controversy originates from the need to understand whether the beliefs associated with racial differences have any genetic or biological basis. Classification of races is mainly done in reference to the geographical origin of the people. The African are indigenous to the African continent: Caucasian are natives of Europe, the greater Asian represents the Mongols, Micronesians and Polynesians: Amerindian are from the American continent while the Australoid are from Australia. However, the common definition of race regroups these categories in accordance to skin color as black, white and brown. The groups described above can then fall into either of these skin color groupings (Origin of the Races, 2010, par6).

It is possible to believe that since the concept of race was a social description of genetic and biological differences then the biologists would agree with these assertions. However, this is not true due to several facts which biologists considered. First, race when defined in line with who resides in what continent is highly discontinuous as it was clear that there were different races sharing a continent. Secondly, there is continuity in genetic variations even in the socially defined race groupings.

This implies that even in people within the same race, there were distinct racial differences hence begging the question whether the socially defined race was actually a biologically unifying factor. Biologists estimate that 85% of total biological variations exist within a unitary local population. This means that the differences among a racial group such as Caucasians are much more compared to those obtained from the difference between the Caucasians and Africans (Sternberg, Elena & Kidd, 2005, p49).

In addition, biologists found out that the various races were not distinct but rather shared a single lineage as well as a single evolutionary path. Therefore there is no proven genetic value derived from the concept of race. Other scientists have declared that there is absolutely no scientific foundation linking race, intelligence and genetics.

Still, a trait such as skin color is completely independent of other traits such as eye shape, blood type, hair texture and other such differences. This means that it cannot be correct to group people using a group of features (Race the power of an illusion, 2010, par3).

What is clear to all is that all human beings in the modern day belong to the same biological sub-species referred to biologically as Homo sapiens sapiens. It has been proven that humans of different races are at least four times more biologically similar in comparison to the different types of chimpanzees which would ordinarily be seen as being looking alike.

It is clear that the original definition of race in terms of the external features of the facial formation and skin color did not capture the scientific fact which show that the genetic differences which result to these changes account to an insignificant proportion of the gene controlling the human genome.

Despite the fact that it is clear that race is not biological, it remains very real. It is still considered an important factor which gives people different levels of access to opportunities. The most visible aspect is the enormous advantages available to white people. This cuts across many sectors of human life and affects all humanity regardless of knowledge of existence.

This being the case, I find it difficult to understand the source of great social tensions across the globe based on race and ethnicity. There is enormous evidence of people being discriminated against on the basis of race. In fact countries such as the US have legislation guarding against discrimination on basis of race in different areas.

The findings define a stack reality which must be respected by all human beings. The idea of view persons of a different race as being inferior or superior is totally unfounded and goes against scientific findings.

Consequently these facts offer a source of unity for the entire humanity. Humanity should understand the need to scrap the racial boundaries not only for the sake of peace but also for fairness. Just because someone is white does not imply that he/she is closer to you than the black one. This is because it could even be true that you have more in common with the black one than the white one.

Reference List

Origin of the Races, 2010. Race Facts. Web.

Race the power of an illusion, 2010. What is race? . Web.

Sternberg, J., Elena L. & Kidd, K. 2005. Intelligence, Race, and Genetics. The American Psychological Association Vol. 60(1), 46–59 . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, November 7). Race and Ethnicity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-ethnicity/

"Race and Ethnicity." IvyPanda , 7 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-ethnicity/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Race and Ethnicity'. 7 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Race and Ethnicity." November 7, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-ethnicity/.

1. IvyPanda . "Race and Ethnicity." November 7, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-ethnicity/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Race and Ethnicity." November 7, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-ethnicity/.

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Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c 1900. Photo courtesy Library of Congress

How to see race

Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure.

by Gregory Smithsimon   + BIO

We think we know what race is. When the United States Census Bureau says that the country will be majority non-white by 2044, that seems like a simple enough statement. But race has always been a weaselly thing.

Today my students, including Black and Latino students, regularly ask me why Asians (supposedly) ‘assimilate’ with whites more quickly than Blacks and Latinos. Strangely, in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court denied Asians citizenship on the basis that they could never assimilate; fast-forward to today, and Asian immigrants are held up as exemplars of assimilation. The fact that race is unyielding enough to shut out someone from the national community, yet malleable enough for my students to believe that it explains a group’s apparent assimilation, hints at what a shapeshifting adversary race is. Race is incredibly tenacious and unforgiving, a source of grave inequality and injustice. Yet over time, racial categories evolve and shift.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation .

O ccasionally there are historical moments when the creation of race and its political meaning get spelled out explicitly. The US Constitution divided people into white, Black or Indian, which were meant to stand in for power categories: those eligible for citizenship, those subjected to brutal enslavement, and those targeted for genocide. In the first census, each resident counted as one person, each slave as three-fifths a person, and each Indian was not counted at all.

But racialisation is often more insidious. It means that we see things that don’t exist, and fail to recognise things that do. The most powerful racial category is often invisible: whiteness. The benefit of being in power is that whites can imagine that they are the norm and that only other people have race. An early US census instructed people to leave the race section blank if they were white, and indicate only if someone were something else (‘B’ for Black, ‘M’ for Mulatto). Whiteness was literally unmarked.

A brief aside on the politics of typography, in case you’re wondering: throughout this article I leave ‘white’ as is, but I capitalise ‘Black’, as well as ‘Indian’ and ‘Irish’. Why? Well, as the writer and activist W E B DuBois said in the early 20th century, during the decades-long campaign to capitalise ‘Negro’: ‘I believe that 8 million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.’ I could argue that I don’t capitalise white because ‘white’ rarely rises to the level of a cultural identification – but the real reason I don’t is because race is never fair, so it’s fitting for inequality be written into the words we use for races.

Putting whiteness under inspection shows how powerful race is, despite the instability of racial categories. For decades, ‘whiteness’ was an explicit standard for citizenship. (Blacks could technically be citizens, but enjoyed none of the legal benefits. Asians born outside the US were prohibited from becoming citizens until the mid-20th century.) Eligibility for citizenship – painted as whiteness – has remained a category since its inscription in the Constitution, but those eligible for membership in that group have changed. Groups such as Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews were popularly defined as non-citizens and non-white when they first arrived, and then became white. What we see as white today is not the same as it was 100 years ago.

Thomas Nast’s cartoons are notorious in this regard. His caricatures of Irishmen and Blacks are particularly shocking because they are a type we no longer see today. Working-class Irishmen are represented as chimpanzees in crumpled top hats and curled-up shoes. Their faces have a large dome-shaped upper lip surrounded by bushy sideburns:

At times, Nast partnered the Irishman with an equally offensive image of a Black American, with big ‘Sambo’-style lips, perhaps a large rump and clunky bare feet. Today, few Americans have an image in their minds of what an Irish American should look like. Unless, perhaps, they meet a man named O’Connor with red hair, Americans today rarely think to themselves: ‘Of course! He looks Irish.’

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . Not all white people look the same

But Nast was not only sketching nasty caricatures of Irishmen; he was doing so in a way that would appear believable to his audience. In a similar example of invisible ethnicity, 15 per cent of Americans in 2014 reported German heritage. This ethnic group is widespread and numerous. So let me pose a simple question: what do German Americans look like? One in seven Americans are German American; how many of the German Americans you meet have you identified that way? Even more so than later immigrant groups such as Italian, Irish or Jewish, German is invisible.

Americans can’t see German, Irish or French, but they could . It’s not the case that all white people look the same. My parents are both of predominantly Irish heritage. One summer, my family was travelling and had a layover in Ireland long enough for us to see the city of Dublin for the first time. We had not left the airport before my seven-year-old son said what I was already thinking: ‘Everybody here looks like grandma and grandpa!’ My family, according to my seven-year-old, looked like people from Ireland.

A few years later, I was to meet a French colleague at a busy Paris train station at rush hour, but neither of us knew what the other one looked like, and there were hundreds of people. I tried to guess which of the women entering, exiting, waiting, smoking, texting and milling about was the person I was to meet, but to no avail. Then I turned, and from a block away, through a crowd of hundreds, a woman waved directly at me. She had picked me out. I had been vaguely aware, before then, that no matter how familiar I got with Paris, I stood out on the subway: I might feel perfectly French riding the train, reading the advertisements in French and understanding the conductor, but when I got home and looked in the mirror, I knew my face was different from the diverse visages I saw in public.

Later I asked my colleague, and she said she knew I wasn’t French. How so? I asked. She scrutinised me. ‘ La mâchoire .’ It was your jaw, she said, with a satisfied smile. Until that day, I never knew there was such a thing as an Irish chin, but I had one. And no doubt, if Nast ever met my earliest American ancestors on the street, he’d know they looked Irish too. We don’t see Irish anymore, we don’t recognise it, we no longer caricature it. But we could.

T he racial category of Asian is just as unstable and entangled with political power as whiteness is. The US census started counting ‘Chinese’ back in 1870 (with no other category for people from the continent of Asia). Around the same time, the census started counting a similarly excluded group, American Indians, which the Constitution had designated as ripe for expropriation. Tellingly, Indian racial categories were unstable from the start: after not being counted at all, Indians were then included but tallied in the ‘white’ column – except in areas where there were large numbers of Indians, where they became their own category.

For Asians, as Paul Schor points out in his fascinating history Counting Americans (2017), the US government counted Chinese and Japanese but still left the rest of Asia blank, adding ‘Filipino, Hindu, and Korean’ in the 20th century. For something so clearly created by people, lists of racial groups are never comprehensive and typically ill-defined. Looking across the Eurasian continent, the US government today is still vague about where white ends and Asian begins. People in the US who were born east of Greece and west of Thailand are often unsure which boxes to check in the US census every 10 years. Like storm-borne waves or wind-blown sand dunes, race is a daunting obstacle that shifts and changes.

During the Second World War, China was a US ally, while Japan was an enemy. The US military decided it necessary to identify racial differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. In a series of cartoon illustrations, they tried to educate American soldiers about what to look for – what to see – in order to distinguish a Japanese solider who might be trying to blend in among a Chinese population.

Today, the ‘How to Spot a Jap’ leaflets are an offensive novelty – used either to illustrate the history of racist stereotyping or sold on postcards as ironic curiosities. But they can also be examined in another way. In The Civilizing Process (1978), the sociological theorist Norbert Elias studied books on manners from the European Renaissance to understand the process of the creation of what he called habitus . Manners that we see as utterly natural and inevitable today, like not blowing one’s nose at the table, or eating off the serving spoon, or belching or farting in public, are, in fact, socially constructed and learned behaviours.

At the historical moment at which they were introduced, books of manners were required to teach what is today utterly obvious to adults. They make for incredible reading. In his chapter ‘On Blowing One’s Nose’, for instance, Elias quotes a ‘precept for gentlemen’ that matter-of-factly explains: ‘When you blow your nose or cough, turn round so that nothing falls on the table.’ ‘Do not blow your nose with the same hand that you use to hold the meat.’ ‘It is unseemly to blow your nose into the tablecloth.’ Some of the recommendations are as poetic as they are graphic: ‘Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.’ It appears that actions that seem completely natural had to be taught explicitly.

Genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics

The ‘How to Spot a Jap’ flyers were printed to serve much the same function as the manners books that Elias studied. They tried to create and implant a racial habitus that distinguished the Japanese from the Chinese. That Second World War poster looks offensive today – crude, reductionist, insulting – and it is. We think that recognising such ridiculousness makes us less racist than the people who made it. It doesn’t. It merely means that we have different racial categories than in 1942.

Chinese and Japanese people look no more ‘similar’ or ‘different’ from one another than Irish Americans do from French Americans. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences as a matter of statistical distribution, but only that what we think we know about race has to be learned, and that what people ‘know’ and ‘see’ as salient and obvious changes over time. Most Americans cannot distinguish a white American of Irish origin versus one of French origin walking down the street, yet they hardly need pamphlets explaining what to look for to tell if someone is white or Black. If the distinction between Japanese and Chinese had remained as significant in the US today as it was to US soldiers during the Second World War, many people would see it as similarly self-evident.

On-the-street racial distinctions don’t have to be ‘perfect’. People often don’t recognise the author Malcolm Gladwell as Black, although he is; other times whites are mistaken for Blacks. For the purposes of making or unmaking a racial difference, genetic inheritance isn’t what matters. What we literally see is shaped by politics. The same two groups can be visibly different racially or indistinguishable racially, depending on the political context and power relations by which they’re categorised.

F rancis Galton was a pioneer in modern statistics. But he was also a eugenicist. Among other things, Galton became notorious for photos in the late 19th century that purported to reveal the ‘Jewish type’. At the time, people believed that Irish, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese or German denoted races. When Jews were a race, people thought that they could tell who was Jewish by looking at them. Today, many Jewish people recoil at the idea that there is a Jewish ‘race’, and find the suggestion that there is a Jewish ‘look’ inherently racist. At various times, then, the US Army, Thomas Nast and the father of the statistical method of regression analysis all believed that there were visually distinct and observable races that many Americans today would be generally unable to identify – certainly not with the level of certainty they’d feel with respect to racial categories such as Caucasian, African American, Latino or Asian.

I suspect that a visitor from a planet without race would have a very difficult time slotting anyone on Earth into the racial categories we use today. If they were asked to group people visually, there is no statistical possibility that they’d use the same set of arbitrary boxes, and even if these categories were described for them in detail, they would probably not sort actual people in the same way as the modern US does.

That we think we see race naturally, when in fact it’s socially constructed, is the third eye through which we see the world. The census prediction that the US will be majority minority is less a conclusion than a question: ‘What future will immigrants of colour build in the US?’ The answer involves not just changes that transpire between one group and another, but changes to the membership of those groups and their symbolic meaning. In response to demographic shifts, the very boundaries of whiteness are likely to shift, as indeed they’ve done before.

In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa

In The History of White People (2011), Nell Irvin Painter argues that the idea of ‘whiteness’ has expanded several times to include more and more people. First came the Irish and previously ‘suspect’ non-Protestants, who ‘gained’ whiteness in the late 1800s. The next great expansion of whiteness came with the social upheaval and physical relocation of both servicemen and migrating industrial workers during the Second World War. In the war economy, groups including Italians, Jews and Mexicans became upwardly mobile, and sought to present themselves in allegiance with Anglo-Saxon beauty ideals (the only Jewish Miss America was crowned in 1945) – all of which helped to recast them as ‘white’. The narrative of white inclusivity continued from the Roosevelt era into the postwar period. Finally, intermarriage eventually dissolved previous notions of racial boundaries. Few white Americans could claim a single national race (Swedish, German, French) with any confidence, and whiteness could no longer sustain the idea of nation-based races. For Painter, this most recent change closed the book on any scientific basis for race, and helped to make the US a country where people are much more mixed, across old racial boundaries, than ever before.

Perhaps this mixing means that the US is finally warming to multiracial identity. But if that is indeed happening, it’s not because of demographics, but because of the tireless efforts of activists who continue to fight racism and racial segregation. Movements for racial justice succeed not simply because of demographic shifts but because racial privileges cannot justify themselves in the face of an organised alternative. Many countries have been minority white yet held on to whiteness; to the extent that whiteness meant citizenship, these were states that were ruled by a minority and oversaw the hyper-exploitation of a much larger part of the country. In the worst case, a majority non-white US could take its cue from apartheid-era South Africa, or Brazil, or Guatemala, where a small light-skinned group has enjoyed privileges at the expense of many more who are excluded.

The path to justice therefore involves attacking the prerogative to categorise people in order to justify their exploitation or colonisation. That means acknowledging and challenging the basis of racial categories. It’s not about a token embrace of multicultural colour: it’s about power, and power is far too wily for us to expect it to stand still and be overtaken by demographic change. We need to confront the force of racial privilege no matter who inhabits the privileged caste at any given moment. It’s no good imagining that innate human diversity will render the system powerless.

T he US shift towards majority non-whiteness is not destiny, but it is an opportunity. Painter notes that when external conditions change, it becomes possible to imagine different racial hierarchies. The geographical and social remixing of the Second World War cooked down the diverse European identities in the US into a single racial category of ‘white’. Likewise, Asian immigrants occupied one role when Asian immigration was largely working class, West Coast, limited in numbers, and male, as it was at the end of the 19th century. But the racial constraints on Asian Americans shifted when immigration law came to favour professionals, and brought middle- and working-class people, women and men, in larger numbers than before to more US cities.

Using shifting social situations to upend racial hierarchies is not just about challenging racism, but race itself. This doesn’t mean the disingenuous denial of race when racism still very much exists, but a collective challenge to its right to determine our lives. The Black Lives Matter movement seeks to take away the police’s prerogative to use violence against African Americans with no legal sanctions; success would undermine an important means of maintaining racial segregation and inequality. What would it mean, once and for all, to bury the shameful, misplaced pride some white people have for the South’s role in the Civil War, and acknowledge instead the irredeemable mistakes of their forefathers? What would it mean to frankly acknowledge each nation’s racial past, and think about what reparations would set us on a path to greater prosperity? Race is neither inevitable nor something we can wish away. Instead, we must take advantage of the instability in what we perceive, and redistribute the power that perpetuates race.

Race never stays still. As the sociologist Richard Alba pointed out in The Washington Post last month, the prediction that the US will be majority non-white by 2044 relies on a definition of race that is static, and doesn’t acknowledge the surprising reality that people’s races change. Nearly 10 million people listed their racial identification differently on the 2010 census than they had in 2000. Alba criticises the census for ‘binary thinking’ which counts anyone with Hispanic heritage as Hispanic, and through a quirk in the census questions, effectively ignores any other racial identity that they could claim. ‘[A] majority-minority society should be seen as a hypothesis, not a foreordained result,’ Alba wrote, of the 2044 claim. This is important, because when it comes to fighting racism, we can’t rely on demographic shifts to do the work for us. Instead, if we recognise that race looks solid but is shifting, we can find additional ways to destabilise the structures of racial inequality.

Getting rid of racism requires clarity about the nature of the enemy. The way to defeat white supremacy is to destroy it. The US will truly be ‘majority non-white’ only when white is no longer the privileged citizenship category, when white is no more meaningful than the archaic Octoroon or Irish. This is not to discount the anxiety about cultural loss conjured by talk of an imagined colourblind future, but to recognise the inextricability of racial identities and power inequality. With work, perhaps the next expansion of whiteness will be into oblivion.

This Essay is adapted from Cause … And How it Doesn’t Always Equal Effect (2018) by Gregory Smithsimon, published by Melville House Books.

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How it Feels to be Colored Me

Zora neale hurston, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In her 1928 essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston argues that race isn’t an essential feature that a person is born with, but instead emerges in specific social contexts. Hurston introduces this theme by describing her childhood in the majority black town of Eatonville, Florida, where, until the age of thirteen, she was not yet “colored.” It was only when she moved to the more diverse Jacksonville and later to New York City that she became aware of her race. Crucially, she also drifts away from this awareness at times, when “the cosmic Zora emerges” and she assumes a more universal identity. In detailing a personal journey towards and then away from a racialized conception of her own identity, Hurston opposes the conventional wisdom of the time that race is an inherent characteristic that determines the personality, ability, and destiny of the individual. With time, she also gains the confidence to think of her race, which has so often been used as a weapon against African-Americans, as an asset.

Hurston becomes aware of her own status as “colored” through recognizing her difference from white people. The moments when Hurston says she can most keenly “feel [her] race” occur when she moves from a black to a white community, or when a member of a white community visits her own. This suggests that race is a social phenomenon—that is, something that originates in one’s relationships to others rather than something that is essential to a person or group of people. Until the age of 13, Hurston doesn’t consider herself “colored” because no one has given her cause to think of herself in those terms. For Hurston, “white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there.” Thus, young Hurston conceived of race as more of a socioeconomic distinction, a matter of differing circumstances, than an essential difference between people. Nevertheless, race as a category begins to feel real when Hurston moves to Jacksonville, where there are more white people: “I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways,” she writes. Hurston goes from not identifying with a racial category to identifying with one completely, showing that race is no less “real” just because it is based in social perception.

Even as she considers her identity as a black woman, with time, Hurston gains the power to minimize or refuse the concept of race. She frames this using the metaphor of the bag , the most crucial aspect of which is not its appearance but what it carries. She analogizes the varied contents of a bag to aspects of a personality, both positive and negative: “A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass.” Hurston’s point is that the exterior of a bag doesn’t affect what it contains, and in this way she uses the metaphor to combat popular conceptions of race as something that determines one’s intelligence, talent, or identity.

Later in her life, Hurston also learns to lean into her African-American identity, even when this identity is maligned or mocked by both black and white acquaintances. As a child, the forced awareness of herself as “colored,” a little girl “warranted not to rub or run,” makes her visible as a target of racial discrimination and control. As an adult, she begins to view this racial visibility as a distinction. That Hurston feels she can control not only whether to identify as African-American but whether that identity is positive or negative, in defiance of wider culture, illustrates the importance of perspective rather than biology when thinking through race. She opens her essay by invoking a stereotype about African-Americans: “I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.” In a tongue-in-cheek way, she’s pointing to what she sees as a tendency on the part of African-Americans to minimize or dilute their blackness by inventing a different ancestry for themselves, thereby claiming a different cultural and ethnic heritage. To “extenuate” something is to make it seem less offensive—more forgivable—but Hurston argues that African descent needs no such apology. She undercuts the idea that her race should be a source of shame and pointedly shows that she embraces it fully.

Furthermore, rather than shying away from the persistent stereotype that people of African descent are somehow more “primitive” than people of European descent, Hurston embraces the stereotype. Describing a scene in which she listens to a jazz band with a white friend , she falls into an ecstatic trance marked by animalistic and tribal language and writes that the orchestra “rears on its hind legs,” “clawing” at the “tonal veil.” She shakes her “assegai,” a type of African spear. Afterward, her white friend meekly calls the performance “good music.” While satirizing the idea that black Americans are in touch with such primitive spiritual forces, Hurston also makes even this stereotyped identity seem powerful and vital. Her primitive fugue reveals her experience to be much richer and more passionate than that of her companion, who is “so pale with whiteness.”

Hurston’s essay uses the framing of her childhood to illustrate that race is a concept rooted in social context, contingent on environment and cultural reinforcement. This frees her to reimagine race for her own purposes, emphasizing her own subjectivity and self-worth by twisting the language of oppression into a language of empowerment.

Race and Difference ThemeTracker

Race and Difference Quotes in How it Feels to be Colored Me

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it.

They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless.

I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag.

Life is a journey, not a race

More often than not (at least in my situation), our lives are an addition of things that happen to us or are forced upon us: we don't live, we survive.

If you were to die tomorrow, would you say you lived a good life? I’m putting the emphasis here on the word “live". More often than not (at least in my situation), our lives are an addition of things that happen to us or are forced upon us: we don't live, we survive. We do all of that in the hope that someday we’ll be free of suffering, free of any external influences. But will we?

If there is something I learned in the last few months is the fact that life is a journey, not a race. Trust me, I tried running, I tried not sleeping and doing my best to keep up with people who run faster than me, hopelessly. I trained for the competition as I was supposed to...  only to discover that if I think there is a race, I already lost.

Life is a journey and everyone is on his own path.  There is no comparison possible so, rather than feeling bad for not being as good/fast/smart as the next person, we should think of what we can do to enjoy it better. Think of it as if you were on a cruise. You paid a lot of money and waited a long time to get there but it’s finally D-Day, you’re on the boat! Now, what is better to focus on: how will other people enjoy the view and the buffet, or how you can enjoy them for yourself?

Treat it as an adventure

A few weeks ago, in one of my newsletters, I mentioned how little change in the way we see the world could have a tremendous effect. Sometimes the mere thought of doing something depresses us because we see it as forced by someone else unto us (school, work, parents). Usually, it’s not the actual task that we don’t like but rather the fact that we didn’t have a choice for it.

And, can we change that? Actually, we can, it all depends on the way we choose to see it! Sure, you might want to let it depress you, it’s your right. But you could instead choose to focus on what you can learn and actually have fun with it. Even the most awful situations and subjects have a bright side (even learning maths or doing chores), we just have to find them!

Last updated: 2 years ago

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Metaphors for Life That Can Fit Your Journey

Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

• Development
• Common Examples
• Using Metaphors

Frequently Asked Questions

Metaphors about life are figures of speech that state that one thing is actually another thing. They are a way of creating a comparison that while not literally true, provides a figurative meaning.

Metaphors for life may help you think about your life and problems in a different way. Metaphors not only help people describe and make sense of their lives, but can serve as a source of encouragement , motivation , or gratitude .

This article explores some common metaphors about life that can be used to inspire you (or help you get out of a rut) in your daily life.

How Metaphors About Life Begin

How do these metaphors develop? As children, we begin to understand and organize the world. If we think of the brain as a filing cabinet, then childhood is when we open the files and label them.

We often spend the rest of our lives putting new material in these old files. If childhood was healthy, then we may have a pretty good filing system. If it was a struggle, then we often see struggles for the rest of our life. We don't know the origin of many life metaphors, but many have stood the test of time for good reasons.

Impact of Metaphors for Life

How do metaphors help us make sense of our lives? Metaphors about life not only help us define and describe an experience, but they can be used to improve our lives in many ways.

For example, some people see life as a battle. Every encounter is a struggle, and if they don't win, they feel like they have lost. Others view life as an adventure. A new day brings new opportunities to explore, and if something goes badly today, there's always tomorrow.

If you are facing a challenge, a metaphor might help you see the big picture and give you strength. For example, someone going through cancer treatment may view the journey as climbing a mountain.

Metaphors can also provide a picture that helps others enter your world. It's true that a picture is often worth a thousand words, but a word picture (a metaphor) can sometimes do the same. Alternatively, a negative metaphor may help you see that you haven't been living your life the way you wish. It might be the stimulus you need to make changes.

While there are no specific studies looking at commonly held life metaphors and wellness, positive thinking is beneficial in many ways. A general attitude of optimism has been correlated with lower rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, and infection.

Common Metaphors About Life

Metaphors for life are not always obvious. We may have to stand back a long way to see patterns. Because the way we look at life can have a great impact on how our lives unravel, it's worthwhile to think about the metaphors that fit the life you currently live.

Metaphors can be positive or negative. These are just examples and not every metaphor will resonate with every individual. Take a moment to think of other metaphors that may describe your life or serve you better.

If you see your life as a garden, you may feel that relationships with family and friends can be cultivated like flowers or vegetables. Relationships, like flowers, need regular watering. They need sunshine. Sometimes they need to be pruned. Sometimes you need to weed the garden (or eliminate toxic friends ).

The end result of careful and regular care, with timely interventions for insect infestations or decay, can lead to plants (or relationships) that are growing, producing oxygen that helps you breathe, and create beauty as they flower.

You may see a battle as a metaphor for your life if everything is a competition or a struggle. In a battle, you are always either winning or losing. If a battle represents your life, you may wish to look at how life isn't always about winning or losing.

Relationships, especially, are not always a competition. Sometimes it is better to be loving than to be right or win.

Viewing your life as a mission can be either positive or negative. You may feel that you have talents and gifts you wish to share. On the other hand, you might feel that you need to convince others that your point of view is the only correct one.

Just as with missions throughout history, your life can be a platform to bring goodness to the world. Alternatively, you may see your mission as the need to impose your beliefs on those who do not wish to hear them.

A journey is a common metaphor for life, as it reminds us that the destination is not our only goal. Like with any form of a journey, there are times when the roads are straight and times when they are winding. There are ups and downs and potholes along the way. And there are often wonderful surprises and fun discoveries that you would never have experienced if it wasn't for the route you chose.

An adventure can also be a beautiful metaphor for life. We don't always know where we are going, but the thrill of our travels (day-to-day living) leaves us excited and ready to see new things.

A building is a solid metaphor for life and can be a reminder that a sturdy foundation is needed before building higher. Once you have a firm foundation in place, whatever that means to you, it's easier to confidently add floors and rooms which will stand the test of time and weather.

Roller Coaster

A roller coaster can be a metaphor for life or it can describe the speed bumps we encounter. For example, people with cancer know the roller coaster effect of a challenging diagnosis. Using the metaphor of a roller coaster also illustrates what many people who have had hardships understand so well.

You don't fully experience the high points of your journey without the contrast of the lows. As proof of this theory, studies are now finding that being diagnosed with cancer changes people in positive ways as well as introducing challenges.

Stained-Glass Window

The metaphor of a stained-glass window illustrates not just the variety of lights and colors which make up our world, but the beauty in every person and situation. Cultivating an attitude of gratitude by taking the time to see what isn't obvious at a quick glance can be illustrated by this metaphor.

Mountain Climb

Climbing a mountain is a great metaphor for many parts of our lives. It can describe our education or the steps we take in climbing the corporate ladder. Life often consists of hierarchies.

This metaphor also illustrates that it often takes hard work, determination, and sometimes sheer endurance to get where we wish to go. Most mountains paths are not directly uphill, but take us down through valleys to get to the next peak.

Emotional resilience allows you to follow the trail as it descends before it turns the corner and heads back up again. This can improve your ability to cope and protect mental health during times of stress.

A race can be both a positive and negative metaphor for life. In the biblical sense of the metaphor, we are called to run the race of life not only for the prize.

A race can also be a negative metaphor, as in the "rat race," describing how sometimes we are so busy going from one place to another that we never really stop to enjoy any particular moment. In yet another negative sense, a race can describe the practice of always finding the fastest route, or needing to keep up with the proverbial Joneses.

If you view life as a courtroom, life can be challenging. In a courtroom, everything in life should be fair. Real life, however, is not always fair. Good people die young and criminals go free. If you try to constrain your life to the metaphor of a courtroom, you open yourself up for repeated disappointment.

Stepping Stones

Stepping stones can be a metaphor for life in many ways. In a negative sense, stepping stones may describe the phenomena in which we barely get comfortable where we are before we are looking for a better job or a bigger house. In another sense, stepping stones can be a very positive metaphor of a life lived with goals in mind , and conscious awareness of the steps needed to get there.

In yet another sense, such as stepping stones crossing a stream in a garden, this metaphor can describe how we sometimes take a detour right or left along our way to prevent negative influences from catching up with us.

Life is a classroom in so many ways and there are always new lessons to learn no matter your age. This metaphor can be a reminder to keep your mind active and learning throughout your life.

A prison can be a metaphor for a life in which you feel out of control. You may feel like you don't have choices and that others have the power. If this is you, it might be helpful to visualize a key to the door by which you can escape to your freedom, and what that might mean in real life.

Learning to reframe a situation such as this can shift your perspective and change your perspective. Doing this can help reduce worry, stress, and anxiety.

A battery can be a life metaphor of being drained and recharged through life, such as the daily drain of energy related to work, followed by weekends and evenings in which to recharge. Often taking small periods of time to recharge at frequent intervals leaves your battery less likely to die (lose all energy).

How to Use Metaphors for Life

The examples above are just a few of the life metaphors that illustrate people's lives. What metaphor(s) fit your life? Do they work for you or do they cause problems and limit your choices? It's possible to change metaphors or modify yours (such as finding the key to the prison cell) but it can take some effort.

Taking the time to think about the metaphors which fit your life can be used to find patterns that aren't working well for you, to motivate you in positive directions, and to help you cope with the obstacles we all periodically face. Think of your life metaphors today, but don't stop there.

Periodically re-think your life metaphors. Are they positive metaphors that bring you peace and contentment, help you reach goals, or allow you to see the beauty around you? Or are they negative metaphors which are limiting your life?

The particular metaphors you choose should be those that fit you alone, not somebody else. Good mental health includes having life metaphors that help you see the big picture of your life. After thinking about your life metaphors, learn about other ways in which you can become a positive thinker and reduce stress in your life.

A Word From Verywell

Metaphors about life can be helpful ways of thinking through problems you might be facing. They can also serve as a source of inspiration and motivation to encourage you to keep working toward your goals.

At other times, negative metaphors might hold you back or contribute to feelings of hopelessness or helplessness. If your life metaphors are hurting instead of helping, look for ways to reframe your thinking in order to take a more positive, optimistic approach.

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is used to symbolize or describe another object or concept, even though the two are not literally related or similar.

Good metaphors for life are those that help you understand problems you are facing and feel motivated to tackle those challenges. Metaphors for life such as comparing your life to a garden, journey, stepping stones, or a classroom can serve as a source of inspiration, positivity, and growth.

Metaphors for life can help you think about problems or challenges in different ways. They can help you make sense of your life and feel grateful and fulfilled. They can also help inspire you as you deal with life's challenges and motivate you to pursue your goals.

Some examples of metaphors for life include:

• "Life is a song; we each get to write our own lyrics."
• "Life is a puzzle; you can only see the picture when you put all the pieces together."
• "Life is a garden; with care and love you can cultivate beautiful flowers."
• "Life is a classroom; you'll always be learning new things."

A simile is a figure of speech that involves comparing two unalike things, often using the words "like" or "as." Some examples of similies for life include:

• Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're going to get.
• Life is like a road trip; every day is a new adventure.
• Life is a like a puzzle; you have to put the pieces together in order to see the whole picture.
• Life is a race.
• I'm as happy as a clam.
• Today was a real roller-coaster.
• You're fit as a fiddle.
• All the world is a stage.
• Life is a highway.
• I am an early bird. 
• I am such a chicken.
• The meeting was a zoo.
• I'm really walking a tightrope.

Kim ES, Hagan KA, Grodstein F, Demeo DL, De Vivo I, Kubzansky LD. Optimism and cause-specific mortality: a prospective cohort study. Am J Epidemiol . 2017;185(1):21-29. doi:10.1093/aje/kww182

Holtmaat K, van der Spek N, Lissenberg-Witte BI, Cuijpers P, Verdonck-de Leeuw IM. Positive mental health among cancer survivors: overlap in psychological well-being, personal meaning, and posttraumatic growth .  Support Care Cancer . 2019;27(2):443-450. doi:10.1007/s00520-018-4325-8

Färber F, Rosendahl J. The association between resilience and mental health in the somatically ill .  Dtsch Arztebl Int . 2018;115(38):621-627. doi:10.3238/arztebl.2018.0621

Eagleson C, Hayes S, Mathews A, Perman G, Hirsch CR. The power of positive thinking: Pathological worry is reduced by thought replacement in generalized anxiety disorder .  Behav Res Ther . 2016;78:13-18. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2015.12.017

Merriam-Webster. Metaphor .

By Leonard Holmes, PhD Leonard Holmes, PhD, is a pioneer of the online therapy field and a clinical psychologist specializing in chronic pain and anxiety.

The Impact of Race as a Social Construct

This essay about the constructed nature of race and its implications discusses how the concept, while often perceived as biologically rooted, is actually shaped by social, historical, and political forces. It highlights the documentary series “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” which reveals the lack of genetic basis for racial categories and traces the origins of racial thinking to justify inequalities. The essay explores the consequences of racial constructs, including disparities in education, healthcare, and justice, while acknowledging how these constructs also foster community and resistance against oppression. It argues for the importance of education in dismantling racial myths and promoting equity, emphasizing that recognizing race as a social construct is crucial for moving toward a more just and inclusive society. The essay underscores the need to view human diversity beyond the myths of racial difference, advocating for an approach that celebrates shared humanity and cultural richness.

How it works

The notion of ethnicity, often perceived as a biological determinant, is indeed a potent mirage sculpted by socio-cultural, historical, and political currents. This illusion, though abstract, yields tangible repercussions that pervade societies universally, molding perceptions, actions, and systemic frameworks. The documentary series “Ethnicity: The Potency of a Mirage” elucidates this intricate theme, uncovering how ethnicity has been fabricated and wielded to rationalize disparities and how its apparent authenticity impacts us collectively. This discourse probes the origins of ethnic constructs, their ramifications on civilization, and the imperative of deconstructing these divisive barriers.

Central to the issue is the realization that ethnicity lacks a genetic or empirical foundation. Historical testimony and genomic exploration attest that the diversities within purported ethnic cohorts are as consequential as those amidst them, dismantling the fallacy of discrete biological ethnicities. Nonetheless, the genesis of ethnicity as a concept served to legitimize imperial conquests, enslavement, and the subjugation of non-European populations by deeming them inherently inferior. Across epochs, these notions were enshrined into statutes and conventions, entrenching ethnic stratifications into societal tapestries.

The repercussions of ethnic constructs are profound and extensive. They have sculpted social dynamics, access to assets, and life prospects, frequently to the detriment of those categorized as belonging to particular ethnicities. Education, livelihood, healthcare, and legal systems evince stark disparities that often stem from ethnic biases and prejudice. Such imbalances are not innate but are the upshot of measures and norms that have systematically favored particular cohorts over others predicated on ethnicity.

The potency of the mirage of ethnicity also lies in its capacity to nurture identities and communities. While wielded as an instrument of disunion and oppression, the socio-cultural fabric of ethnicity has also facilitated the genesis of opulent cultural legacies, solidarity amidst marginalized factions, and endeavors for civil liberties and parity. The endeavor against ethnic injustice has precipitated momentous societal metamorphoses and strides toward parity, albeit the odyssey remains incomplete.

Acknowledging ethnicity as a socio-cultural construct constitutes the primary stride in disassembling its divisive potency. Education assumes a pivotal function in this endeavor, as it can elucidate the historical and societal origins of ethnicity, counter stereotypes, and foster comprehension and compassion amidst heterogeneous groups. Furthermore, policies aimed at redressing ethnic disparities must transcend colorblindness, which habitually disregards the lived experiences of prejudice, to actively disassemble systemic obstacles and foster equity.

In summation, “Ethnicity: The Potency of a Mirage” compels us to scrutinize and confront the entrenched preconceptions of ethnicity. By apprehending ethnicity as a mirage with substantive repercussions, we can commence disentangling the intricate fabric of social, economic, and political facets that perpetuate ethnic disparities. This awareness is indispensable for cultivating a more equitable and just civilization where individuals are not delimited by the capricious confines of ethnicity. As we progress, it is the shared humanity and the opulence of diverse heritages that ought to delineate our interactions, not the myths of ethnic disparity.

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The soft life: why millennials are quitting the rat race

Ambition once came with a promise: a home, a salary, progress and fulfilment. What happens when that promise is broken? Meet the women who are turning their backs on consumerism, materialism and burnout

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R ose Gardner did everything right. Straight As at school and college, a first-class degree from a top university, a master’s. She got a job in publishing and rose through the ranks of some of the industry’s most prestigious companies before getting a job with a media organisation. Eventually, she bought her own flat in London.

But each time she reached a new milestone, she didn’t feel any real joy.

“I remember walking into my flat, and this might make me sound so ungrateful, but I felt scared,” she says. “I knew I was going to have to keep working at this job that I hated to pay the mortgage.”

It wasn’t that there was anything particularly bad about the job, it was more that as time went on, she says she didn’t feel driven by the consumerism that the companies she worked for depended on. She’d lost her sense of materialism and didn’t get much from going to bars, clubs or parties. On top of that, she had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which made working in an open-plan office with a strict 9-5 policy incredibly hard. Gardner, 42, works best in isolation, early in the morning and in the evening, and she didn’t feel her workplace was prepared to accommodate that. Pushing through her afternoon “crashes” for years had become exhausting. So, five years ago, she had what she called her “Jerry Maguire moment”. She quit. She sold her flat and moved back to her parents’ house in Wiltshire, where she now works part-time in hospitality and handcrafts jewellery and ceramics from a shed in the garden. She has little income, but also very few outgoings.

“My parents are getting older and I pay them rent and my own bills. I have my own little area. We get to live a separate but together life and I see that as a privilege. I meditate and take long walks with my dog in nature … I lost my relationship with myself when I listened so much to what I should be doing. Now, I get a lot more pleasure out of the small things.”

Gardner is living what is increasingly becoming known online as the “soft life”. As a millennial, she is part of a generation brought up to take pride in hard work, who now find themselves in the midst of a cost of living crisis and the third recession of their lifetimes. As Gabrielle Judge, better known online as the Anti Work Girlboss, says: “You think your managers will take care of you? Your job will take care of you? That really crumbled for millennials, especially during the 2008 recession.”

For millennials and the younger generation Z and Alphas, who may never be able to afford to buy a home or retire at a reasonable age, there is a growing feeling online that hard work is fortifying a system that, at best, is giving them nothing back and, at worst, is actively screwing them over. And so the “soft life” revolution was born – where the priority is no longer about working yourself to the bone to be a #girlboss or “leaning in” to the corporate male world, as former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, and pushing until you “have it all”. The goal of a softer life is more time and energy for what makes you happy and as little time as possible focusing on what doesn’t.

Judge, 26, coined the term “lazy girl job” back in 2023 on TikTok. She had graduated with a computer science degree in 2019 and got a job at a tech company. Two exhausting years later, she received a $10k a year pay increase. On the surface, it seemed great. But then she looked deeper. “Even before taxes, that’s only $5K a year for doing 60 hours of work a week,” she says. And with inflation factored in, it was technically a pay cut. “I didn’t see the payoff,” she says.

Judge was forced to take two months off after a serious concussion – and she never went back. She got an entry-level job in customer services for a website-building platform. “I was technically underemployed and wasn’t really using my degree, but I was still paying my bills and was comfortable,” says Judge, who lives in Denver, Colorado. “It was the biggest breakthrough on a spiritual level – with my friendships and relationships.” And that is where her notion of a “lazy girl job” started to form – a job that is typically low in stress, fully remote and with enough salary to pay for the bare essentials.

Judge has since built a huge audience online – with more than 400,000 followers across her various social media platforms. She has created a community of people sharing their stories of working all hours and getting little in return as mass redundancies and AI come for their jobs. She now advocates for a four-day week, living wage and prioritising health and wellbeing. “I’m not telling people exactly how much they need to be working,” she says. “I’m just trying to create more permission for whatever makes you happy.”

Abadesi Osunsade, 37, speaks to me as she power walks between her meetings. As the CEO of her company Hustle Crew, which delivers diversity and inclusion training, and co-host of the podcast Techish, she is not the most obvious proponent of the “soft life”. Yet she advocates for the same “laziness” and boundaries that Judge champions. In her 20s, she worked in tech startups, doing 12-hour days while building Hustle Crew in every spare moment. She lived in a “six-week cycle of burnout”. Now her own business is established, she has been able to introduce “softness” into her life, making time for relationships, exercise and visiting family in the Philippines. This “softer” life is a work in progress “and that’s OK,” she says. What is most important for Osunsade, is to no longer define herself by her output. “Productivity and fulfilment become conflated,” she says. “What value do you actually get from being busy? Are you cultivating enough self-love and self-awareness to enjoy downtime?” She says many of us feel guilt when not filling every hour serving some greater purpose or goal. “Why is there shame in not being busy?” she asks. “Have we been so brainwashed by capitalism that you have to be busy to be worth something?”

Osunsade views the late-capitalist approach to work as being mired in historical and cultural prejudices. “For black people, our value was as forced labourers. If you can socialise people into thinking that they are only good for what they make and what they do, the other side of that coin is that they’ll feel guilty when they’re not doing anything.”

She puts the rise in “soft living” down to the current economic and political climate – especially the Trump administration. “A lot of that naive optimism that helped movements like ‘lean in’ happen was confronted by the crushing reality of patriarchy,” she says. And telling women to just work harder to become equal with men has proved a fallacy when, 10 years on from Sandberg’s book, the gender pay gap remains at 16% in the US . As Michelle Obama put it: “it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time”. Especially if you have the intersectional pressures that immigrants, queer women and women of colour have, too. The soft life is a logical reaction to a macro-level business model that suppresses the wages of society’s most vulnerable.

In the US, Black women earned 30% less than white men in 2022. In the UK , that figure is 26% – and it rises to 31% for Pakistani women. This discrimination takes a toll on the body and spirit. Even high-profile figures such as MP Diane Abbott face levels of abuse that far surpass their white professional counterparts. A leaked internal Labour party report from 2020 documented how Abbott’s colleagues would mock her for crying and called her “repulsive” and “angry”. It is this additional burden that makes the soft life even more appealing to young Black women. “It’s listening to your mind and body’s needs and putting them first in a system where women are encouraged to put others’ needs before our own,” says Osunsade. The poet and feminist Audre Lorde in her book A Burst of Light set out the radical implications of self-care and womanhood, writing, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

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The soft life approach is not without its critics. In 2022, Kim Kardashian infamously claimed that women need to “get your fucking ass up and work” as “it seems like nobody wants to work these days”. She was forced to apologise – after it was pointed out that coming from a rich, already-famous family in LA would have its advantages in the job market. Not to mention that while Kardashian has become a billionaire off the back of her fashion and beauty brands, some former employees alleged that they were scraping by on unlivable wages, with barely enough money to get to work. Other figures have made “soft living” about a generational divide. Whoopi Goldberg has said that millennials and gen Z who feel that life milestones such as having children and owning houses are out of reach just aren’t working hard enough. “I’m sorry – if you only want to work four hours, it’s going to be harder for you to get a house,” she said. Jodie Foster told the Guardian that gen Z are “really annoying” to work with. “They’re like: ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’”

“We’re being lectured on not being hardworking enough by people who have no idea what it is like to never switch off,” says Osunsade. With Zoom and Slack keeping us connected to our workplaces at every moment, it is no longer plausible to say that you haven’t seen the emails that ping into your smartphone at the weekend. For Judge, she feels there is a “tendency online to blame all societal ills on our parents’ generations … but baby boomers aren’t stupid for doing what they did for their careers … I’m just saying it doesn’t work in today’s age.” The “return on investment” on working all hours for some kind of meritocratic ideal “just isn’t the same any more”.

No longer can you do everything society asks of you and be guaranteed to attain even the lowest totem on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, when in the US 53% of people living in homeless shelters were employed in 2021, and one in four of the households made homeless in 2022 in England had at least one person in work .

But to choose not to work, or to work less, can still be judged as a feminist betrayal. Osunsade recalls a conversation she had with an older colleague who described a bright young woman stopping working after having children as “an absolute crime. What a waste of a mind!”. “There is a sense,” she says, “that we have to have it all because people fought for us to be able to have it.” It was that idea – that a brilliant brain must be offered up on the sacrificial altar of capitalism – that made Gardner so miserable at work. As a child, “I was very much told art was a hobby and that I needed to go down the academic route, otherwise it would be a travesty … It felt as if choosing to do what I love was being lazy. I equated being successful with doing something I didn’t like.”

All around me I see overwork. Top editors who freelance at the weekends, small business owners who don’t have time to unpack the boxes in the homes they moved into three years ago, self-proclaimed cogs in corporate machines who drink Huel at their desks because they have no time to eat. Social conversations with peers vacillate between how unaffordable London, where I live, has become and symptoms of our almost perpetual burnout.

Is it possible to achieve a softer life without entirely uprooting yourself, which may not be realistic for many? For Osunsade, it’s about accepting that “people can only prioritise a small number of things. Women in particular, get into this trap of wanting to be the best mother, writer, friend, runner and yoga person in the class. We need to be happy with being the best in one or two roles and content with being mediocre in others.”

Embracing a little mediocrity is at the core of other online workplace trends, from “ quiet quitting ” (doing the minimum your job requires of you) to “ bare minimum Mondays ”. Osunsade suggests doing an “audit of priorities. Decide what your non-negotiables are. If it’s important for you to do bath time with your kids every night, then that is just a permanent block in your calendar that no one ever touches because it’s sacred. Every time you schedule a class, a walk, a beauty appointment, or buy a book, see it as a meeting that you can’t cancel.”

Gardner is now thriving in her softer life, which is filled with creativity and family. She finally feels that her life is a success. “There’s something about softness that is not valued in the corporate world or isn’t understood. It’s seen as a weakness.” But now, she says, “I see it as a strength.”

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Why life to me is valuable and like a race

‘life is valuable to me like life is a race…’.

The term life to me has many meanings, but one thing that becomes apparent every time I think about the matter is that life has too much value and that we have to live life as best as we can so as to rip the best things it has to offer us before we run out of time. Life is fast, and unless one values it and lives as if it were valuable, there is a big chance that one can lose out. This paper, therefore, is my story of how I perceive life. Life to me is like a race; a fast race that you either win or lose. To me, life has a lot of value and this value has to be utilized to the minimum. The story below will show how I discovered that life is valuable, and how I became to perceive life as a race.

In my younger days, before I developed into the person I am today, I was a troublesome child; hardheaded and set on my ways without the hope of ever listening or considering the views of others. Before all changed, I attended and became a constant member of one of the most common schools on earth; a school that everyone has attended at least once in their lifetime. This school takes in everyone no matter what state, stage or position in life they are in; these things do not matter to this school, and I am sure everyone has gone to the school once. The school am talking about here is the extremely common school in life called the School of Hard Knocks. Up to date I have not come across a more effective, memorable and efficient school in life.

Since I was hard-headed, stubborn and set on my ways in more than one way, it is only fair to admit that I got quite a share of this School of Hard Knocks education. I remember listening to a youth counselor in one of the many youth camps I attended. He was talking about how the fastest runner in a race does not always have to reach the finish line before the other runners who might even have started the race at a lesser speed. This seemed like something that had been taken out of the bible as I had attended some bible classes in my days and I was sure there was a verse in the bible that had the same ideology of life.

Little did I know that I would later live the exact experience the youth counselor at summer camp was explaining?  At the same camp, we constantly held summer competitions that involved various games such as racing, football, and other kinds of sports. One of the competitions that were being held at that time was a racing competition. I was considered an extremely excellent runner in most of the camps that I had attended, and I was sure that, in this particular camp, I was by far the fastest runner. I was sure would outrun everyone else in this particular race.

The race soon began and as I had thought I was outrunning everyone else and I was way ahead of them in a few seconds, but there was a problem. In the previous three months, I had dislocated my foot ankle, and though it had healed well, I started feeling some discomfort in my bad ankle. The doctor had warned that I should not strain the leg for a number of months, but I assumed that the leg had healed in the three months I had been idle. However, this was not the case, the discomfort increased, and I could not walk or run properly. I started to limp badly, and in no time, the other racers had outrun me and they were way ahead of me. However, I was glad that it was not that serious as no one stopped to see what was going on.

I was able to complete the competition, only, I finished it last. I had anticipated that I would finish first and take home the crown. Someone else, however, won and got to take the coveted price home . I was so sad that someone had taken away something I had wanted so badly, and by the fact that I would not enjoy watching my parents as they beamed with pride when I showed them the trophy. However, I was glad that my little brother had won more than 10 trophies in math contests. I saw it as a way life evened out my defeat. I am extremely proud and happy to have such a talented brother, and I was glad that his trophies were around to hide the fact that I had not brought home any trophies.

Lessons learned

I learned a number of lessons from this experience. For example, I learned that an individual’s talents, abilities, and capabilities only count for a small percentage of the successes such an individual achieves later in life. Another lesson I learned is that life can be understood or taken as a race. A race, therefore, can be a good example of how life is. Take, for example, the fact that in a race there are no guaranteed wins. Life is just the same. One can be sure that they have all abilities and resources to achieve certain goals, but at the end, they can fail to achieve the same goals just like a racer can fail to win. It was clear from my experience that there are no guarantees that an individual will always emerge at the top even if they have the capacity to achieve this. It was during this juncture that I remembered my counselor’s words about the fastest winner not always obtaining the trophy, and I realized that his words were true.

There, I was the fastest runner in the camp expecting to emerge the winner; something that was disapproved at the end. Back to life, we can make the same conclusions as in a race. The wise sometimes go without food, and the skillful, in life, are not always the ones driving the biggest cars. Additionally, the most educated people are not always the richest, or the successful individuals in life. It would be fair to conclude that the outcomes of life, just like those of a race are influenced by several variables, and not just by abilities or skills. For example, ones success can be determined by chance, by one being at the right place and being at there at the right time. These variables that determine success not only apply to track racers but also to the skillful, the educated, the wise, strong and the wealthy.

This, however, does not mean that being wealthy, skillful, educated, wise, strong, or having special abilities is wrong. It is quite clear from some examples that good education, or the appropriate skills can contribute to one leading a successful life. Take Bill Gates, for example, his skills, education, wisdom and hard work have made him one of the most successful and wealthiest men worldwide . However, it is essential to realize that, especially after the example with my experience, that there are no guarantees that something is going to go the way one sees it. This means that one’s success is mainly determined by other forces and not just his attributes.

I changed a lot after some of the experiences I got from the school of hard knocks. I spend less time being stubborn and rude, and, as a result, I spend less time in this hardship school.

I realized that some situations can go either way; I could win in some cases or at other times, I could lose. After learning this, I became more comfortable with life, and I realized that I did not always have to win for me to be happy and content. I learned that I should take and value each situation the same; both winning and losing. I later learned that I should never take my winning or losing at face value and that I should consider the overall worth of each situation. For example, if I lost it did not mean all was lost. I could have lost and let someone else win who needed the win much more than I did.

With the exception of some of these bad experiences I had at the school of hard knocks, I had a wonderful time at most of these camps, and I sometimes think that my loosing at that particular race was essential and extremely beneficial for my life. The reason I say this is that, without these experiences, I would not have learned the valuable lessons I learned after I lost that race. Later I discovered that some of the finest teachings are those that we win and never receive a trophy. The experiences life teaches us are prices worth more than other prizes received as trophies. This is because it is not only kind of trophy that helps us learn through valuable lessons and help us mature and grow up into adults who are productive.

As it was indicated in the above story, a race can be exemplified to life. The reason I conclude this way is because in most cases the two have the same goals, and one of them is to emerge successful at the end of hard work. Races can be used as metaphors for life because they impose on individuals the same lessons life imposes on them. For example, one can learn from races and life that winning or becoming successful is not a guarantee and that at times people lose and other times they win. It was learned from the above story that people should value the outcomes of their just the same.

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The physical sensations of watching a total solar eclipse

Regina G. Barber

Science writer David Baron witnesses his first total solar eclipse in Aruba, 1998. He says seeing one is "like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world." Paul Myers hide caption

Science writer David Baron witnesses his first total solar eclipse in Aruba, 1998. He says seeing one is "like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world."

David Baron can pinpoint the first time he got addicted to chasing total solar eclipses, when the moon completely covers up the sun. It was 1998 and he was on the Caribbean island of Aruba. "It changed my life. It was the most spectacular thing I'd ever seen," he says.

Baron, author of the 2017 book American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World , wants others to witness its majesty too. On April 8, millions of people across North America will get that chance — a total solar eclipse will appear in the sky. Baron promises it will be a surreal, otherworldly experience. "It's like you've left the solar system and are looking back from some other world."

Baron, who is a former NPR science reporter, talks to Life Kit about what to expect when viewing a total solar eclipse, including the sensations you may feel and the strange lighting effects in the sky. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Baron views the beginning of a solar eclipse with friends in Western Australia in 2023. Baron says getting to see the solar corona during a total eclipse is "the most dazzling sight in the heavens." Photographs by David Baron; Bronson Arcuri, Kara Frame, CJ Riculan/NPR; Collage by Becky Harlan/NPR hide caption

Baron views the beginning of a solar eclipse with friends in Western Australia in 2023. Baron says getting to see the solar corona during a total eclipse is "the most dazzling sight in the heavens."

What does it feel like to experience a total solar eclipse — those few precious minutes when the moon completely covers up the sun?

It is beautiful and absolutely magnificent. It comes on all of a sudden. As soon as the moon blocks the last rays of the sun, you're plunged into this weird twilight in the middle of the day. You look up and the blue sky has been torn away. On any given day, the blue sky overhead acts as a screen that keeps us from seeing what's in space. And suddenly that's gone. So you can look into the middle of the solar system and see the sun and the planets together.

Can you tell me about the sounds and the emotions you're feeling?

A total solar eclipse is so much more than something you just see with your eyes. It's something you experience with your whole body. [With the drop in sunlight], birds will be going crazy. Crickets may be chirping. If you're around other people, they're going to be screaming and crying [with all their emotions from seeing the eclipse]. The air temperature drops because the sunlight suddenly turns off. And you're immersed in the moon's shadow. It doesn't feel real.

Everything you need to know about solar eclipse glasses before April 8

In your 2017 Ted Talk , you said you felt like your eyesight was failing in the moments before totality. Can you go into that a little more?

The lighting effects are very weird. Before you get to the total eclipse, you have a progressive partial eclipse as the moon slowly covers the sun. So over the course of an hour [or so], the sunlight will be very slowly dimming. It's as if you're in a room in a house and someone is very slowly turning down the dimmer switch. For most of that time your eyes are adjusting and you don't notice it. But then there's a point at which the light's getting so dim that your eyes can't adjust, and weird things happen. Your eyes are less able to see color. It's as if the landscape is losing its color. Also there's an effect where the shadows get very strange.

Crescent-shaped shadows cast by the solar eclipse before it reaches totality appear on a board at an eclipse-viewing event in Antelope, Ore., 2017. Kara Frame and CJ Riculan/NPR hide caption

You see these crescents on the ground.

There are two things that happen. One is if you look under a tree, the spaces between leaves or branches will act as pinhole projectors. So you'll see tiny little crescents everywhere. But there's another effect. As the sun goes from this big orb in the sky to something much smaller, shadows grow sharper. As you're nearing the total eclipse, if you have the sun behind you and you look at your shadow on the ground, you might see individual hairs on your head. It's just very odd.

Some people might say that seeing the partial eclipse is just as good. They don't need to go to the path of totality.

A partial solar eclipse is a very interesting experience. If you're in an area where you see a deep partial eclipse, the sun will become a crescent like the moon. You can only look at it with eye protection. Don't look at it with the naked eye . The light can get eerie. It's fun, but it is not a thousandth as good as a total eclipse.

A total eclipse is a fundamentally different experience, because it's only when the moon completely blocks the sun that you can actually take off the eclipse glasses and look with the naked eye at the sun.

And you will see a sun you've never seen before. That bright surface is gone. What you're actually looking at is the sun's outer atmosphere, the solar corona. It's the most dazzling sight in the heavens. It's this beautiful textured thing. It looks sort of like a wreath or a crown made out of tinsel or strands of silk. It shimmers in space. The shape is constantly changing. And you will only see that if you're in the path of the total eclipse.

Shots - Health News

Watching a solar eclipse without the right filters can cause eye damage. here's why.

So looking at a partial eclipse is not the same?

It is not at all the same. Drive those few miles. Get into the path of totality.

This is really your chance to see a total eclipse. The next one isn't happening across the U.S. for another 20 years.

The next significant total solar eclipse in the United States won't be until 2045. That one will go from California to Florida and will cross my home state of Colorado. I've got it on my calendar.

The digital story was written by Malaka Gharib and edited by Sylvie Douglis and Meghan Keane. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected].

Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify , and sign up for our newsletter .

NPR will be sharing highlights here from across the NPR Network throughout the day Monday if you're unable to get out and see it in real time.

Correction April 3, 2024

In a previous audio version of this story, we made reference to an upcoming 2025 total solar eclipse. The solar eclipse in question will take place in 2045.

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Guest Essay

My Story Was Told in ‘Hotel Rwanda.’ Here’s What I Want the World to Know Now.

By Paul Rusesabagina

Mr. Rusesabagina is the president and founder of the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation.

This week, the world will again turn its eyes toward Rwanda. April 6 marks 30 years since the start of one of the most horrific events in modern history, the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Nearer in time but not unrelated, it has been just over one year since I left Rwanda and returned to the United States, released from prison after 939 days in captivity .

I have not yet spoken at length about what those years in a Rwandan prison were like, or about the daily reality for Rwandan political prisoners who, like me, found themselves behind bars for exercising their freedom of expression. It has been a long year of physical and emotional recovery that has allowed me finally to put pen to paper again, and I expect the healing process will last the rest of my life.

The experience of being kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and silenced by those whom I had used my voice to criticize is difficult to describe. At many times during my captivity I believed I would be silenced for good, and that I would never again see my wife, my children and my grandchildren. But today I am a free man. And as we face this important and difficult milestone, I feel grateful to be able to join with my fellow Rwandans and reflect on what, if anything, we can take from this terrible chapter of our shared history.

For me and for so many Rwandans, the 1994 genocide remains the focal point of my life. The months of April to July 1994 were a time of incomprehensible horror, in which our beautiful country was dragged into hell by brutal violence and killings on a scale previously unimaginable. At some points in the crisis, as many as 10,000 people were butchered in a day, primarily by machetes and other crude weapons. Even now, three decades later, and even for those of us who saw the killings firsthand, it is impossible to process the depravity and the gravity of the loss.

At the time, I was the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where I tried to protect not only my own young family but also the 1,268 people who sought shelter within the walls of the hotel. Their bravery, and our daily macabre dance with death, became the backdrop of the 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda.” This film brought to the screen our compromising, negotiating and begging with our would-be executioners to try to keep the waiting militia at bay.

This experience is still difficult for each one of us to relive. I am grateful to have survived it. I am also grateful for the two personal lessons I decided to take from living through this atrocity. The first: Never, ever, ever give up. This is what sustained me when I was kidnapped in August 2020 by an operative of the Rwandan intelligence services and wrongfully detained in Rwanda on charges of terrorism and other crimes, along with others who were critical of the current government. The second: Words are our most effective weapons when we are confronted by those who seek to oppress and victimize others.

Both of these lessons are on my mind today, as the world considers the state of Rwanda 30 years after the genocide brought us to our knees.

Now Rwanda is viewed by many nations as an important global partner — a partner that has bravely rebuilt itself into a thriving and inclusive modern society. But it is increasingly difficult to remain blind to the jailing — and even the disappearances and killings — of those who criticize or challenge the Rwandan government’s power. Independent journalists, human rights advocates and opposition political parties are nearly absent from the landscape of Rwandan civil society today. This is not a reconciled or inclusive society; it is an authoritarian state.

The rest of the world should stop looking the other way. As a global community, we are being confronted with the rise of authoritarianism and the co-opting of institutions meant to support basic liberties, such as the freedom of press, speech and association. Throughout the world, politics is being used as a tool to promote division, and in some cases violence, in order to gain or maintain power. We continue to see the fundamental human rights that we fought so hard for being upheld only for certain people in certain circumstances. And, as is so often the case, the vulnerable members of society are the ones who pay the greatest price. Rwanda, which today lacks strong democratic institutions and free and fair elections, is not immune to these problems.

I believe that it becomes the role of those of us who have been empowered by our circumstances to speak out, to act as a check on abuses of power and to resist the erosion of our fundamental rights. It is imperative to speak against those who seek to reduce civic space and basic freedoms for their own political gain, choose to fuel violence for profit and openly engage in brutal wars for material wealth. This becomes our work, even if speaking out puts us in the direct line of fire, as it has for me and my family.

Thirty years on from the Rwandan genocide, there is still cause for hope. We can see young Rwandans all over the world continuing to advocate genuine reconciliation and the building of a democratic Rwanda, despite the overt risks of doing so. We can see the bravery and unfailing resolve of the women of Iran and Afghanistan and those who support them. We can see the open resistance of people in Myanmar, Ukraine, Syria and Sudan standing up to tyranny and oppression. Their courage reminds us that it is our collective duty to counter autocratic regimes and policies and promote equality and, above all, peace.

This is my prayer, and hope, for the next 30 years, for Rwanda and beyond.

Paul Rusesabagina served as manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali during the Rwandan genocide, a story later told in the film “Hotel Rwanda.” In 2005, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush. He is the president and founder of the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation.

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