2012 – 4th Grade National 3rd Place Winner

Isabella Cho, Illinois.

What is the meaning of life ?

I think life is a journey. A collection of experiences. These experiences help to make everyone a better person. Experiences can be bad and good. But the essential and most important thing about an experience is that it always teaches us something. If we all try our best, we could make the world an even better place.

Each person is a traveler. Travelers take many photos. Each snapshot is one memory. An album is a group of memories all bound into one single book. In real life, looking through an album is like mentally flipping through the story of your life.

Travelers take photos because they never want to forget that experience. Memories benefit us because you can always look back at them. When you look back at them, you can feel many kinds of emotions such as joy, sadness, or anger, and learn that you should always try to do things like that or if you should never do or try things like that again. Photos are the memory-holders of life, and your important and meaningful experiences. We can learn from memories by looking back at them and thinking if that was a good choice or if it was not. We can also learn from memories by thinking what moral we learned from that experience. Making mistakes is a necessary part of our lives because if we never made mistakes, we would never learn. I believe that mistakes are the key to learning. We learn life lessons and morals from our mistakes.

In life, you meet many new people. In other words, we open up our hearts to new people. That is very important and enriches our lives because if you don’t meet new people, then you will become bored and lonely. Each person has something new we can learn from. This is so important because if we learned nothing from other people, your emotions, personality, and your style of living would stay the same. Your bad habits would not improve. Travelers meet many new people and friends on travels. That makes the travel better, more exciting, and you have more people to talk to and interact with.

We also try many new things in life. Trying new things can make the world a better place because if people try new things, they can get to know more things. If we know more things, we can coordinate much better with the people around us. Then everyone could work as one, united, and that means we could get to know people better and solve complicated questions that we face in life together as one. We try new foods, clothes, moods, styles, ways, and many more. Trying new things is good for you because if you always stick to the same thing, you could ignore all the new and wonderful things in life, not only using the old ones. Travelers try new things because that is the beauty of looking at new cultures, and it is also the point of taking the journey. Travelers seek out new things, and they enjoy the new things! Travelers also try to find new things because it makes their journey better.

In general, life is a journey, not a destiny. We are each a traveler. The journey we take is up to us.

 

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