This I Believed, Essay Example

The title is correct. We can’t talk about what we believe without talking about what we believed, and that means talking about change, and what caused the change. But that also means talking about what hasn’t changed in us, if and how we resisted and kept ourselves the same.

I had listened to National Public Radio’s This I Believe segments before getting this assignment, but when I first heard the program’s solemn, bell-tolling words, I immediately re-imagined it as This I Believed. It gave me a quick chuckle. To me, it was funny because of its overtones of rueful wisdom and cynicism. What I also liked was imagining the same essays, unchanged, under that new title. Think what a different light it would put them in, as well as their authors! My own private thought-crime. So now the opportunity has come along to write about my subversive idea. But how? Just to make sure that This I Believed hadn’t already been turned into a buzz phrase, I Googled it. Amazingly, it hasn’t. (But there is a funny site called iusedtobelieve.com.) Having gone that far, the problem was to synthesize two essays into one reflecting my personal perspective. Each essay had to come from the same theme. But what theme, and what was I going to say? Then I thought: why not let others say it for me? So I found two essays that could have been entitled This I Believed. Not surprisingly, the theme is humility.

What we have in these two essays are crises caused by an external event and a literal internal one. The time span is twenty-two to fifty years. Both caused a crisis in confidence and outlook, and a change, but changes of fundamentally different kinds. Neither have anything funny about them, and one might even be a kind of tragedy born of external defeat. Putting them in summary form makes them sound banal, as indeed do most of the This I Believe essays.

In 2005 Elizabeth Earle wrote Have I Learned Anything Important Since I Was Sixteen? The title references an earlier This I Believe essay, written for the original Edward R. Murrow program in 1955, when Earle was sixteen years old. After a brief self-introduction, Earle starts off by writing that since 1955 My own life has gone well, with much happiness and no exceptional grief or pain. Her crisis was 9-11, which caused her to start going back to church, something she had stopped doing over the years. Her own synthesis is I’m grateful that I still have some time to keep trying to get it right, and to savor each remaining day in my life.

Now let’s compare that with Rose Eiesland Foster’s Keep It Real, published in 2005. My philosophy of life sure isn’t the same as it was, say, twenty-two years ago. Her crisis was bad health, both her own and those of her husband, siblings, and mother, all of whom died as she watched and helped as best she could. Her synthesis: So my philosophy of life now is just three words long: keep things real. And it hasn’t let me down yet. Both seem to ask little of life.

I can only wonder what I will be writing about my life in twenty-two to fifty years. Of course I can’t really say what crises I will encounter and how they will change me. Will I go to religion, like Earle did, or simply ignore it, like Foster? Will the cause or causes be internal, external, or both? And most importantly, will I be able to resist the forces that will try to make me change. Will resistance be stupid or smart, reactive (Earle) or adaptive (Foster)? Will even trying be a sign of integrity or the lack of it? And what about humility? How will that fit in?

Earle is humble. Foster is defiant, which we might view as humility with an attitude. Each here exemplifies what I mentioned in the introductory paragraph: who or what changes in response to a crisis, and who or what resists. Earle is humble because by being so, she is acknowledging that there are forces beyond her understanding, and she needs to recognize that. So she goes back to church. Frankly, I think the less of her for it. I think she would have been stronger to have the courage of her gradual loss of faith over the years. Foster didn’t go back. Foster learned but didn’t really change the way Earle did, and didn’t retreat. (Earle sounds easier to be around, and Foster might even be a bit of a nuisance, but that’s beside the point.)

And my own synthesis? Hubris born of resignation. 

I suppose I could talk at length about my own beliefs and hopes for my own future. But in general the ones I could talk about or would be willing to talk about would sound pretty much like anyone else’s my age. Our own cycle of crisis, learning, change, retreat or defeat hasn’t had time to go as far as it has for Earle and Foster. So I doubt it would be helpful for me to try to put too much into or take too much away from this essay, or their essays. It’s too soon to assume the pose of knowing anything of akin to what Earle and Foster know. That’s my hubris or insight. Instead, I can see that the real thing takes years of training at the hands of reality, random and unfair. All of which will make this paper funnier, or sadder, when my own true time of synthesis arrives, twenty or fifty years from now, when This I Believe will be This I Believed.

Works Cited

Earle, Elizabeth. Have I Learned Anything Important Since I Was Sixteen? 2005. Web. 21 Feb. 2012.

Foster, Rose Eiesland. Keep It Real. 2005. Web. 21 Feb. 2012.