The Last Word

By Finn Marshall | Posted: Wednesday July 16, 2025

So, you know how as a Year 9, you see someone do their Last Word, and think “Hey, I’d love to do one!”

But then when it comes to finding an original idea, it’s impossible? Well, I found myself in that situation until I stumbled upon a video. Now who here watches either shorts or reels? C’mon, hands up. Right, so for those of you that raised your hand, there’s this extract from a podcast that caught my attention. In the video, it talks about an ant and a Biro pen, and the host says that the man draws a circle with the pen around the ant. Harmless, right? The ant can just walk over the ink circle, and continue on with its life without dwelling on anything. And yet, even though there’s nothing stopping the ant from escaping, it thinks that it’s trapped by the black ink, as if its mind has imagined that it can’t overcome the barriers that it’s created around itself. See where I’m going here? 

Anyway, the man retries, this time using a spider. Same Biro pen, same circle, same results - imprisoned by its imaginary enclosure. But as he draws the circle smaller and smaller around the spider, it accidentally steps over one of the lines. Pretty quickly, it realises that those ink walls that “confined it” really didn’t, and even though the man kept redrawing lines to try and re-trap the spider, it wouldn’t be encased by the pen ever again. This, if you can’t tell, is what I want to talk about today. Those barriers that those bugs created, yeah we do that too, just more on a decision-based level than actually being caught. Ok, say you’re a star rugby player, but you have always loved jazz. You’d love to play the saxophone and join the jazz band, but you stop yourself and create barricades around yourself because you’re under the impression that a jock can’t play a musical instrument, and has to stick to being a sporting guy. But once you let those assumptions go, and climb over those walls surrounding your personal interests/major decisions in your life, you’ll end up actually enjoying your life a lot more. Who would’ve thought that? 

Ok, here’s an even better example. That guy, up on screen smiling far too wide for school, yeah at the start of this year, he couldn’t casually talk with a girl to save his life. About three months after that was taken, he went to the OBHS Formal with a stunning young woman, and somebody told me that he had the time of his life with her. Why? Because he broke out of the confines of his fear of rejection, hyped himself up, and asked. That’s all there is to it. Being able to muster up enough courage to, just like the spider, step over that first line, and once you do, you’ll never be trapped by those delusions or that fear of rejection / fear of being clowned because you love the…didgeridoo? I dunno, whatever you like beneath the surface. 

And maybe the result isn’t how you hoped it would turn out. Oh well. But you’ve still stepped outside of the circle that you’ve made in your mind, even if only by a small amount. Because now, all it takes is a bit of confidence to take that next step, and you’ll never look back. Just don’t get too ahead of yourself, alright? Trust me, it feels absolutely crap. Anyway, back to it. The whole point of this is to make it known to yourself and your subconscious that, although you may think it be stupid to take up a new hobby that you’ve always wanted to try, or ask a life-changing question, being able to summon the courage to pull that off, and step out of your own Biro circle, is admirable, regardless of what the outcome might become. Of course, in true OBHS fashion, I’ll end with a quote, that being from Nike - "Just Do It".