Personal Narrative: To Be A Big Machine

I must be there right? My part is of the same importance as any other of my other classmates, I was sure of it. No I’m not Mary or Joseph, but of the disciples I had an equal amount of responsibility. My lines were a crucial part of the story, essential to explaining the birth of my then savior, Jesus. Only I had practiced to say the two sentences assigned to me. This is what my third grade self led me to believe the night before the presentation of St. Bernard School’s Christmas show. Hours earlier I, for one last time before the performance, stepped on the lime-green X placed in front of the towering microphone. “Three wise men would follow a star leading them to the town of Bethlehem, in Judea. Where they would find a baby in swaddling clothes, …show more content…
Hopeless now to regain my spot upon that stage, look into the radiating spotlight, and be apart of the machine that was a simple school performance. Until this very moment I could not quite comprehend how easily a broken cog in a big machine could be replaced. When you are 8 years of age and beginning to understand how systems are designed with a fail-safe, your perception of society is entirely changed. My undeveloped brain must have been doing a number on itself at that point in time. I now had to understand and accept the theory of replacement. All along this idea had been present in my mind. Being a fan of sports, I understood that when a player became injured and could not play they were substituted for a second string player who could temporarily fill their spot. For the first time I had found that more often than I was led to believe, a system dependant on a single sources contributions could effortlessly replace said sources if required. This is viewed by most as a source of relief, knowing that their failure to contribute to a system can be fixed by a temporary replacement. For me it became a way to manipulate systems of which I was not a fan, proving to be detrimental to my future success. I unfortunately at the early age of eight understood that dependency can be disregarded when a system has a way of completing a task without the inclusion of all sources. This meant that I would begin to ask …show more content…
Washington. In the same position as myself, I was accompanied by a friend by the name of Caleb. It was a moment in which I truly felt lost, atop a mountain, in the rain, being ravaged by the elements, at a time when the city sleeps. We walked out onto a manmade platform, hanging over the edge of the mountain, held in place by the immense weight anchoring it into the rock. I stood amongst the millions of people that belong to the city that I grew up in, and know everything about. Caleb stood there, and with a brief sigh said, “Who looked at the terrain of Pittsburgh and decided I think this a good place to build a city?” I looked around, whilst also accessing prior knowledge I had of the cities quite unpleasant terrain, but still could not come up with a legitimate answer to the question being asked. After a minute of silence he continued, “Why here?”. Still not knowing how to answer the question, I thought of everything I had learned in school. Then continued visually examining the city, from a point of view where everything is visible. Unable to come up with a valid response, I turned my head and asked. ”Well why not?” I thought to myself in that moment, all along I had been constantly searching for a reason why before everything I did. Everyday I would constantly question whether or not every decision I made was going to benefit me in some way. Not until that moment had I ever thought