The Last Word

By Vinnie Gable | Posted: Tuesday August 16, 2022

The last time I gave a speech was back in Year 11, in Level 1 English with Ms Brown.

I was terrified then to speak for just 5 minutes in front of a class of 30, mostly made up of my mates. So I rushed through, trying to get to the end as fast as I could. I spoke too quickly, delivered it poorly and ended up getting an achieved. This was the first of only two achieved grades I have received ever in NCEA. So, it is safe to say I am not qualified to be giving a speech to you right now.

That was the inner voice going on inside my head the entire time I have been preparing for this speech. The truth is of course, anyone who has a decent message is qualified to give a speech. But these pervasive, unwelcome thoughts still consistently troubled my mind.

We all have anxieties, however large. For some it will be as specific as the number of internals you have yet to finish, getting UE, or making a sports team. Others’ fears will be more broad; perhaps the unknown, or the weight of expectation placed upon them by themselves or others. Recently for me, it’s been this speech. These pressures, unfortunately, are permanent, they will come and go but there will always be a new challenge over the horizon. And it is human nature to dwell on these things. We will each have recurring, defeatist thoughts, none of which will be devoted to solving the problem. Obsessing over events that have yet to happen. To quote Seneca, “We suffer more in our imagination, than in reality." This, I believe, is an inevitable part of the human condition.

However, what we can affect is the force that compounds these pressures; our natural aversion to face them. It is a great deal easier to pick up a screen or put on the TV than to stare into the face of your troubles. However, all this will do is give your anxiety time to fester in your brain while you mark time. Distracting ourselves from our problems does nothing to solve them and the longer they remain unresolved, the more they build up in our brain.

Only when we make a deliberate step toward bettering ourselves or achieving a goal, do we feel better. All it takes is one small productive step forward at first, any small amount of progress toward improving whatever it is you are concerned about. This first step will always be the hardest and take the most amount of willpower. But once you have taken that step, every bit of progress after will continue to minimise the problem. However, if not and we fail to address our anxieties, we resign ourselves to a life of constant fear, simmering just below the surface.

Most importantly boys, I’d like to remind you, life is far more simple than we make it out to be in our minds. When we change our frame of reference and worry about the long term, we cannot help but become disoriented by the uncertainty in our lives and the multitude of things beyond our control. We habitually worry about how the people we meet will perceive us, how our lives will transpire, our own mortality and place within the universe. However, it is not for us to decide these things and never will be. Therefore I ask, if nothing else, you remember this one message, a quote by JRR Tolkein, “All we have to decide, is what to do with the time that is given to us.”