Seeking The Owl Research Paper

Seeking the Owl It is said that the great quest in life is to find happiness and in happiness wisdom. Aristotle says that happiness is among the highest of goods, that it comes from a sense of being at work, a work that makes your soul feel at peace. It is a type of work that you can do with beauty and excellence. It is something that only you can do, it is your gift. And through this, you are able to do the work that God intended for you. A New York University film called this search of happiness and wisdom, seeking the owl. Some people spend a long time searching for what they are destined for but sometimes you get fortunate and the work finds you. I was three when gymnastics found me. It was like a fire being ignited in my soul, it had
immediately made it’s way to my heart’s round table. I knew in an instant that this sport was for me and that this is what would make me wise. I grew up in the gym, it was my home and my teammates became my family. I traded a childhood for long hours in the gym, sacrificed school sports, sleepovers, and football games for leotards, sweat, and chalk. But, in turn, I learned learned the lessons of taking risks, strengthening my mind, and trusting myself even when I didn’t believe in myself. That was my happiness, it was the work that I could do forever, when you experience a world where you felt the owl, you spend forever trying to get back. When you find a passion that kindles a fire so strong in your soul, even the hardest days change you. And that is makes you, those are the moments that define you. Gymnastics pushes you down, you fall, you fall so hard that you start to break and fall apart. But you have to find the little girl that fell in love with the sport so long ago, she will remind you of how far you’ve come. She will bring you back to the gym day after day to continue the sport that has held your heart for so long. But, what happens when you grow up and realize you are not made for it anymore? What happens when the girls that were your family begin to fade away and the thing that brought so much joy becomes a weight on your shoulders? Gymnastics is not a lifetime sport, you have it for a short time and you have to take in everything that it has to offer while you can. You come to a point where your body has taken enough beating and scaring, you know it is time, that the work is done. After that, it all goes away in an instant. Everything you have known is taken away. There is nothing quite as empty as losing the one thing that made you who you are, it causes your whole world to fall apart. There is a hole that seems as if it can never be repaired because there is still a part of you that wants to go back to the sport because it gave you so much, it made you special. Gymnastics has given me all that it can. But losing the one thing that made me the person that I am today, allowed me to realize something. Life is all about finding your passion, finding your gifts and doing them with grace. It took losing the sport that captivated my soul for thirteen years, to learn that you can have another passion, that you can strive in more than one thing. I learned that it takes letting go of one in order to find the next. So, that is what I am doing, I am seeking the owl.