Book 1 Post 1

    I remembered reading a post of one of my writing classmates a few weeks ago. She talked about how she wouldn't want to be alike as her parents when she was little and how she realized the much influence her parents brought her growing up. I felt resonated when I read over her post. I felt the same way for my parents. It's the exact same feeling when I start reading Gloria Steinem's My Life on the Road. In the first chapter, Gloria talked about how her dad brought her to different places and how she was always on the road to different destinations ever since she was a kid, and how she later realized that those experiences shaped her personality and impacted her adult life. Things that our parents did to us at a very young age might truly determine what kind of people we are becoming later even though most of the time we couldn't realize the importance of influence.

    I would like to quote one sentence from her book "As a child who wanted too much to fit in, I worried that we would be abandoned like those towns one day, or that my father’s rule-breaking would bring down some nameless punishment. But now I wonder: Without those ghost towns that live in my imagination longer than any inhabited place, would I have known that mystery leaves a space for us when certainty does not? And would I have dared to challenge rules later in life if my father had obeyed them?

    Linking back to myself, I would think of my dad as the one who liked to drag me to work out every Saturday and Sunday morning. I would think of any excuse to pretend that I can't be able to make it with him and my behavior would really trigger him to push me harder. I would end up jogging with him for a couple of miles near our neighborhood. He always tried to tell me that the essential part of running is not to finish the miles at a quick speed but to stay at a stable breathing pattern where you could be able to adjust your speed depends on situations later on. I was always trying to prove to my dad that I was able to finish more quickly than him but I quite often failed due to my lack of endurance. Now I realize that the part of perseverance that inside of my body actually came from my dad's training when I was a kid. I am no good at competing for speed but I usually find myself quite comfortable picking up speeds along the way. Guess that explain why I like hiking so much.