Undergraduate /
"Embrace the Uncertainty" MY COMMON APP [14]
Hi everyone!
I really need someone to review my essay. Because I'm a Japanese student, not from international school, I have no mentor to support my application process for colleges in America. So, I need your help here! I'd appreciate if you would give me any advice/criticism/impression. Specifically, do you think that my essay needs more detail? or is it too general?
Thank you so much!
"Embrace the Uncertainty"Pouncing on coastal settlements like large breakers, a catastrophic tsunami swept buildings and people out to sea. After that, it remained nothing around the coastal village of Asahi, Chiba. The image is a poignant reminder of the void I experienced in my eighteen when I was seeing my future just as the darkness. The violent tsunami actually wrecked our precious town, but it also questioned my identity and eventually reconstructed it.
Every time I recall my high school days, I have a disruptive feeling that mixes complacence with nothingness. As a serious athlete, devoting most of my time to Track & Field, I'm confident that I have accomplished some feats in my athletic career. At the time, the world around me looked remarkably clear because I had a solid meaning of my life, in which I surely knew what I had to do : doing weight training every Wednesday, doing stretching exercise thirty minutes after taking a bath, having good foods that contain rich protein and carbohydrate within a week before games, and so on. I lived in a certainty, which enabled me to determine the value of anything based on whether it would contribute to my athletic success or not.
However, this calm moment began to disappear as my retirement season approached. By turns, something that had remained hidden behind a curtain suddenly revealed itself to me. I realized the end of an era, and that my life changed into quite ordinary yet really uncertain one. As a matter of fact, it had all been an illusion; that sense of certainty, which drove me in my high school days.
Nevertheless, by the time the earthquake happened, I still hadn't understood entirely what it meant for me to no longer be able to be an athlete who trusted eternal certainty. Afterward, I realized that it was the biggest part of myself that would never return, like the pastoral coastal village of Asahi which was destroyed by the tsunami. The empty districts attested that everything inevitably has its end, which can emerge in a matter of seconds with vanity. I was shocked to find the world insubstantial, and that struck me for a long time. Yet, I gradually changed my attitude toward the world as time went on. I have come to take every moments of life more carefully than ever because of its fragility. I have gotten to aspire to challenge myself and the world again because of its uncertainty.
I still cannot tell exactly what it was that I received as an eighteen years old witnessing the devastating disaster, but since then it has resided in my eyes. I can just express it as a sort of light. When I look into the mirror, I find my eyes now have a tremendous power within them, a force that is ready to accept the reality, even if it seems the darkness. In fact, still I cannot recall the vivid sight of the damaged coastal village of Asahi without fear, but now I know that I can explore the world to embrace something uncertain. "Traveling from one time to another and then disappearing without trace, yet making tiny attempts to chisel a mark in the flow of eternity to show our resistance. That's what we do in life."(548words)
