These I Can Promise

The reason I titled my blog "What I Can Promise" is largely because of the Mark Twain Poem "These I Can Promise":

These I Can Promise - Mark Twain

I cannot promise you a life of sunshine; 

I cannot promise you riches, wealth or gold; 

I cannot promise you an easy pathway 

That leads away from change or growing old. 

But I can promise all my heart's devotion; 

A smile to chase away your tears of sorrow. 

A love that's true and ever growing; 

A hand to hold in your's through each tomorrow. 

I think this poem holds true to many people's idea of the future and the person they'd like to become. There are a lot of things in life that I can't promise. But I hope to be able to be there for the people in my life, to do all the things this poem lists, to be devoted, to help ease sorrow, to love, and to help someone get through the day. There are a lot of things I don't know, like how many miles it is to the moon, or what the population of Greece is, or what the meaning of life is (although I am starting to think that the meaning of life is to find the meaning in life, which is a whole complicated idea all in its own) but I do know that I have a lot of compassion, and I'd like to be able to share that with the people in my life.

The other reason why I named my blog "What I Can Promise" is because of what I mentioned earlier in class today. I want to make a difference in my life and the society that I live in. I've started that a bit with the work I'm doing with Umbrella, but I want to go further than that. I want to write articles about conflicts in the middle east and about feminism and how the world is entirely unfair. More importantly, I want those articles to be read and talked about, and maybe even change someones idea about something, to make them think in a different way then they did before. I remember the articles in The New York Times that I used to read, the articles in my father's copies of The Rolling Stones, articles in Reader's Digest that would be at my doctors office. All the articles that I remember impacted me in some way. They opened my mind to ideas that I was previously shut to. They made me think about life, how I was living it and how I wanted to begin living it. There are books that I've read that made me think as well. The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald, The Fault In Ours Stars - John Green, As I Lay Dying - Faulkner, Huck Finn - Twain, Where The Sidewalk Ends - Silverstein, Henry V - Shakespeare, The House on Mango Street - Cisneros, 1984 - Orwell, The Color Purple - Walker. Most of these were school assignments, but I ended up loving all of them and they changed me in a way. This is what I want to do with my life. I want to change someone, just by writing down an experience and developing it further, to explore the meaning behind it. This is the type of writer I hope to become.

Kaitlin