Making Peace
Wenona’s Student Leadership Team share their youthful insights and advice with their younger peers in Assembly each week. This message comes from Community and Service Learning Prefect Ivy.
Feelings of fear, sadness, and a loss of control are a universal part of the human experience. While many of the world’s population are faced with poverty, famine, conflict, and despair those of us privileged enough to live relatively easy lives, still need to tackle these difficult emotions.
With assignments and exams coming up soon, I’d like to share my thoughts on how I manage pressure, in the hope that you might find it helpful.
Now that I am in Senior College, I often find myself feeling a bit anxious or a little stressed. Things like assignments, work, friends, siblings, and families can be quite stressful, and leave us feeling moody, agitated, and defeated.
However, recently I have become better at making peace with the fact that life does not always go as planned and am more capable of managing difficult feelings. This is because I have become aware of the idea that you only need to work on what you can control, and not let things overwhelm you.
For example, my advice is to not worry about what others think of you, because this is something practically out of our control. Rather, spend more time building resilience and reflecting on how you think of yourself and your own self-value. You could also try to do things that make you feel good, such as going out for a walk, talking to others, or even offering some help to people in your everyday life, and volunteering work.
As you might know, I finished my Studies of Religion HSC last Thursday, and this speech has been greatly inspired by the teachings learned in this course. For example, Christianity teaches us not to worry, for God is taking care of us. In Islam, we are informed that with faith in Allah or God, a content and righteous life will follow. Interestingly, Taoism, a Chinese spirituality and philosophy, also gives advice to us on the idea of ‘Wu Wei’, meaning non-doing. It reasons that everything is indeed out of our control and therefore we need to learn to just let it be. You don’t necessarily need to be religious or spiritual to take some inspiration from these ideas, but I hope you get the general message of ‘do not worry!’.
It is also worth noting that building relationships with the important people in our lives is extremely valuable in tumultuous times. I encourage you to reflect on what you can do to effect a positive change for yourselves and at the same time look out for your friends, support each other, and give help when you can. That is the aim of our Prefect initiative Hands In—Wenona!
Ivy
Community and Service Learning Prefect
2022/2023