Can a positive aptitude be attained if a person is not born with it? The answer, as I have now found out, is yes. While this may not seem that surprising, its connotations are quite profound. In an article by TIME magazine published in 2007, it was discovered that certain regions in the brain will expand due to consistent engagement in a particular activity. The study was later redone with the test subjects merely thinking about doing the activity, but it exhibited the same results.

In the experiment, volunteers practiced the piano for two hours a day for five days in a row. Their brain scans afterward showed a significant increase in the area in the brain devoted to finger movements: the motor cortex. The experiment was then changed into having the volunteers mentally practice the piano with their fingers still. The same results in the brain ensued, and this points toward the idea that mental practice can be equally as important in learning a skill as physically doing the activity.

What does this mean for life application? The brain can be trained. Repeated activity has been proven to alter the brain in a positive way, with the neurological messages in the brain traveling faster between areas with each successive practice. However, this experiment also explored the effects of merely thinking about an activity. (This means a great deal to me personally, since I am an active participant in a variety of sports. I was always told to ‘visualize’ every kick I made with the soccer ball or every race I’d run in track. I never quite understood how it would help me, but to have actual evidence backing up this practice should be enough for any sports enthusiast to try visualization with his/her sport. )

The experiment was again amplified. Rather than thinking about practicing an activity, subject groups were brought in to meditate while scientists analyzed their brain. Experienced Buddhist monks were one of the groups analyzed, and newbie meditators were brought in as a control group. The result? The monks were revealed to have much higher brain activity in the regions signifying empathy and compassion. In addition, the monks had strikingly active left prefrontal cortexes, the area marking happiness. Over time, the monks had trained their brain through meditation to have a higher baseline happiness. This is significant in the area of mental illness, since meditative techniques could be a more attractive alternative to heavy dosage of medication, but an outline for how this could be used to treat illnesses has not yet been thought out.

So what does this mean for right now? I myself have always had a negative connotation when I thought of meditation, since I pictured it to be a trance-like state that meant you automatically had to be worshiping Hindu gods or Buddha. However, I don’t believe that’s the case now. Meditation doesn’t have to be in the form of sitting in a secluded room, cross-legged, mumbling under your breath. Meditation could be as simple as positive reinforcement throughout the day. In some other experiments, those with mental illnesses such as OCD or depression were told to use mindful meditation to try and combat the illness. This takes the form of distancing yourself from your thoughts and analyzing yourself as if you were another person. This takes away judgement from yourself and gives perspective to certain circumstances that could overwhelm you, such as a bad grade on a test.

While this is labeled ‘meditating,’ I see it as more ‘positivity training.’ The subjects had to analyze themselves objectively in order to diagnose and help a problem. I see this as effective, but I believe reflection on individual worth could be as effective, if not more. Identifying who you are is a necessary question to answer for anyone, but the real problem that I believe is linked to certain disorders such as anxiety or depression is forgetting where your worth comes from. Distancing yourself from your thoughts and actions could be a way to deciphering who you are, since you don’t have to identify your self as your thoughts or actions. After all, aren’t humans more than their thoughts? Some innate characteristic is inside ourselves making us more than what we do or say, but the people that lose sight of what that is or have never found it, it can easily fall into a state of depression.

In other words, when all your thoughts and actions are stripped away from you, what keeps you going to live another day? Whether it’s a religion or an idea, that answer must be enough to satisfy the mental baggage you have to battle through every day. And while I don’t think meditating has to be a closed-eye, crossed-legged activity, I believe it is only beneficial when you are pondering some existential question. For me, as a Christian, I know my worth comes from God, and that’s an idea that gets me through the constant change of life. I can meditate not only on that idea but the ideas that follow it in the Bible, such as in Joshua 1:8. But for others, that answer might be different. Whatever it is, quiet reflection can literally change your brain.

In addition, the Buddhist monks that were focusing on pure compassion also exhibited decreased brain activity in the regions known to distinguish between oneself and what is not oneself, therefore diminishing egoistic tendencies. Continual practice with any activity will produce results, but the continual practice of quite reflection on worth and compassion can permanently change the brain’s reactions, possibly raising one’s baseline of happiness and altering one’s instinctive responses in a positive way.

Article on experiments: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438,00.html

Religion is fantastic. It gives community, fellowship, and a great foundation from which you can learn from and with. However, it also is very frustrating. And before you write me off as a sacrilegious bigot, you should know that my faith is the most important aspect of my life. I attend church regularly, am a leader of a small group, and have been a Christian my entire life. However, my personal beliefs contradict quite a bit from my church’s beliefs. I am a lover of science, believer in creation-guided evolution, and I look to the context of the Bible in order to decipher its meaning, rather than taking it at face value. I think of science as a means to faith, while some conservative church-goers see science as a means to hell.

“Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power, religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts, religion deals with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

Some fellow Christians would come after me with pitchforks for quoting that excerpt, but that’s okay. After all, my faith is different than my religion. My religious church has distinct values and has to report back to its denomination, Christian Missionary Alliance, to make sure their preaching is in accordance with the CMA’s. The politics of that drives me insane, since it seems like pastors have to decipher truth through their denomination, rather than God’s word. What happens if a pastor receives a God-given word straight from the Spirit, yet it vastly contradicts his denomination? Must they throw it away in order to preach a denomination-sanctioned message?

My beliefs, on the other hand, can adjust and shift with new knowledge and context given to me by my church, my parents, and my experiences. I can listen to the wisdom of those around me, filter in what I believe to be true, and hopefully come closer to God’s truth. The freedom to not agree completely with my church and my religion means that I can form my own opinions, pray my own prayers, and form my own relationship with God through my beliefs and faith.

After all, truth is not relative, but perspective is. I hold the belief that even though God and everything that comes from Him is true, the people that decipher God’s word are still human. Preachers, as precious and God-seeking as they are, still have free will. They have their own perspective on the Bible, and they preach accordingly. It’s my job to take in what they have to say, relate it to my own experiences and what I believe is true, and then either adjust my beliefs or not.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

However, it’s also my job to know that my views and opinions are not perfect either. I have great respect for those preaching the message every Sunday morning, and their Godliness is an inspiration. Yet they view the Bible from their point in life, and I view the Bible from mine. Therefore, I think it’s dangerous to rely on one preacher every week for insight into God’s mind, and I find it necessary to hear other preachers’ views on the same text in order to solidify my opinions.

Likewise, it’s also important to hear from other religions. The only way that I feel that I can fully comprehend Christianity’s beliefs is to know what they’re compared to. There are hundreds of religions out there, all preaching different messages and ideas. There are also thousands of people willing to die for their own beliefs, and their perspective on truth is vastly different than mine. How do I know that my religion is the ‘right’ one? My faith tells me it is, but my faith has to be through perspective. Perspective of different religions, different preachers, different denominations.

This is the only way know to be sure what you believe is true. And while I always laugh at the celebrities who stand on a pedestal and claim that they’re “not religious, but spiritual,” I also understand where they’re coming from. Religion bring community and a God-based atmosphere, and yet also can bring constraints to personal faith. I love my church, and I would go to arms with other Christians to protect the word of God. However, I’ve also accepted that while my personal beliefs can be adjusted by the church, they can never be equated to the church.

My religion defines who I am and the range of what my beliefs are, but my own personal faith defines who I am in God’s eyes. My beliefs fluctuate, change with age, are confusing and indecipherable and untrue at times, but they’re my own. Whatever my opinions are at one time, they can never change who God is or who I am.

Don’t get me wrong-I’m not a middle school dropout. I was merely homeschooled for the first sixteen years of my life. I’m now a junior in high school and enrolled in post-secondary enrollment option at a local community college, but I have no fond memories of those traditional high school walls. Or any memories, for that matter.

The only experience I get from other high schoolers is athletics. That was the deal with my parents: my sisters and I were to be homeschooled through tenth grade, but we had to join athletics at the high school in order to be properly “socialized.” It was a good plan, and seventh-grade spring track finally began to coax me out of my drop-dead shyness. (Seventh-grade fall soccer on the other hand — I probably said ten words.)

I was then partly immersed in the social aspects of high school. Seeing teammates, coaches, and athletic directors on a regular basis, yet being strangely secluded from all other happenings at the high school. I didn’t know the drama that went down between Amber and Ashley in fifth period— in fact, I had no idea who Amber and Ashley were, or even when fifth period was in the course of the day. I would just nod and go along with whatever my teammates were saying — that would get me friends, right?

As many people know, the traditional stereotype of a homeschooler is a uncultured, awkward, country hick who has no sense of style besides denim, who has no less than seven siblings, and never misses a day of church. Furthermore, there are two categories for the scholastic part of homeschooling: you either have no respect for academics and choose to play outside rather than do your work, or you’re a freaky genius who does nothing but school and is ahead of their grade by approximately six years. This stereotype never fails to amuse me, especially since it’s incredibly true for some homeschoolers that I know.

I’ve had to fight against this stereotype my whole life. It was the reason my parents put me in club soccer when I could barely walk, why they got upset at me if I didn’t make eye contact with my coach, why I joined school sports the first chance I could. Sure, I had three older siblings that got to test the waters with high school athletics before me. They tried to help me meet new people and make connections, but there was only so much they could do. There came a point that I either had to match the stereotype, or I could attack it with whatever I had. I chose the latter.

My social outlets were athletics and church, and I forced myself to be the happiest, most talkative person that I could be. Since nobody in the high school knew my face, I had to actively seek out people and introduce myself: and I was quite proud of my twelve-year-old self when I made my first high school friend. Don’t get me wrong — the ‘happiest, most talkative person that I could be’ just brings me up to the level of normal teenagers. And even so, the people that first met me when I was just coming out of my shell still think of me as a very quiet, sweet person to this day. Somehow I can’t get myself past that stereotype once people already have me pegged, and that’s why I now work hard to not have them peg me.

These are all things that I would never have worked on if I went to “regular school.” Granted, I perhaps wouldn’t have needed to work on them, but with a stereotype glaring me in the face since I could walk, I have had to learn to look past it and delve into society much deeper than I would need to if I hadn’t had the homeschool stereotype to defeat. I had to learn to fight it with energy, conversational skills and good humor — cause who doesn’t like a healthy homeschool joke every now and then? Fighting my stereotype helped me learn that laughing at myself automatically makes other people feel at ease. Rather than merely telling someone that I’m homeschooled, throwing in a joke about social awkwardness or denim alleviates the pressure of the conversation. It’s what the respective party automatically thinks about when I tell them that I was homeschooled, so why not bring the stereotype to light?

It’s now humorous to tell people that I was homeschooled… They say in their well-cultured tones that they never would have guessed, and I hide it very well. Like it’s a kind of disease or something. Something to be ashamed of. Well, maybe it is. My life growing up was a plethora of Veggie Tales, Awana and awkward conversations, and it was surely something that needed to be cured. Right?

I don’t think so. Sure, I made some fashion mistakes when I was ten. I didn’t have a solid group of non-church friends until I was twelve. I averted many handshakes, followed my mom through family reunions, and could barely talk to strangers until I was thirteen. But so what? The fight against my stereotype has made me stronger, more outgoing, and has left me wanting to make a difference. I have to fight to get involved in extracurricular activities, and fight to make friends when I enter an environment where no one knows me. What public schoolers have that opportunity? I don’t have the National Honors Society to help me find volunteer organizations, so I have to actively look for volunteer opportunities and directly contact the owners of businesses.

And sure, I’m a youth leader at my church. Honestly, what homeschooled teenager isn’t? It’s more than just knowing I have a stereotype. It’s being aware what people will label me as, and expanding my portfolio so that prospective colleges and jobs can see that I’m not a typical Amazing Grace-singing nerdy homeschooler. I have to go outside my church, outside my comfort zone, and truly figure out who I am.

Being schooled at home for the first sixteen years of my life didn’t make me a hermit, but rather a person bursting at the seams to find the beauty in humanity, and doing everything she can to be close to it. I may not have had the traditional high school experience, but I think I found something better: balance. And in that, a new perspective from which I can see myself all the more clearly.

Side note- ‘Amber’ and ‘Ashley’ are completely fictional names

The train is riddled with stories. I witness strangers becoming friends, awkward arguments over the phone, and fellow students like myself cramming for an upcoming test. I hear the train conductor walking by and making small talk with some passengers, or throwing out random jokes while greeting everyone with a smile.

The rides in the morning and in the afternoon can be eventful, but by far my favorite part of the train is the ride home. The sleepy faces that I saw in the morning are now weary from a long day at work, and everything in their aura outwardly yearns to be somewhere else than where they are.

This is when I see strangers in their most vulnerable state. Their eyes gazing blankly at the train floor as they await the next stop that will get them a step closer to their true destination: home. While the train in the morning may be filled with greetings, pleasantries, or small talk, the ride home exhibits no such traits. Work has beaten their outward contentedness into obscurity, and complete strangers start to look strikingly similar as they wait impatiently to leave the crowded confines of the train.

However, these melancholy people inspire me beyond what they could ever know. Their bored faces and absent fidgeting reminds me just how alike we all are. Right now in society, it has become very important to become introspective in order to grow internal awareness. This in itself isn’t bad at all. In fact, this is a major step forward in the area of mental health and self-confidence. However, I believe these practices have also made us incredibly self-focused, and perhaps even pompously so.

I struggle with this myself. In order to acquire confidence about who I am, I focus on myself in order to build my confidence up to where I want to be. I think about MY friends, MY family, MY school, MY relationships, and my introspective self reassures me that my life is going great and that I’m an important part of society as a whole. However, I’ve noticed that all of this time spent focusing on myself makes it harder and harder to see the line between healthy self-confidence and not-so-healthy pride.

With seven billion people on this earth, it’s kind of amusing to know that pride is an issue in society. A person like myself that has rarely experienced other cultures and has never been out of the country, standing on a soapbox and feeling like they’ve conquered the world. Everyone believes themselves to be the hero of their story, and is that what self-confidence is all about? Self-assurance to the point of pride?

No. I think society has self-confidence drastically wrong. I don’t think true self-confidence can be acquired while being introspective. Sure, you have to learn to accept yourself for who you are and be confident in that aspect, but that’s only the first step. I believe that true self-confidence can only be found when you realize how truly insignificant you are. Sounds counter-intuitive perhaps, but to me this is the only thing that gets me past the dangerous affiliation between self-confidence and pride and gets me to look around and see the world around me. These are the moments that I treasure: the moments that I feel my weakest and yet my strongest.

These moments often take place on the train home from school. Once I force myself to stop thinking about MY plans and MY to-do list and MY chores, I can finally see how truly small I am. However large I think my friend group is or how popular I could be, I look around on the train and see people that I have never seen before. They have never seen me, never thought about me, never would spare a second to look in my direction unless I actively seek a conversation.

And yet, life goes on. Every single person that I see has someone they love somewhere in the world. Someone who loves them. Some of these people will go home and greet their kids, their dog, their spouse, and their face will break into a smile that I will never see. Every single one of these people has laughed so hard they’ve cried, and yet at another time they’ve been distraught and cried themselves to sleep. Their worries could be far bigger than mine, and no matter what I’m going through there might be half a dozen people in that train car that are going through the same thing.

Most of these people I will never know. Seven billion people in the world will never know my name, never cheer at my successes, never shed a tear when I die. The train for me is a transition place. A place that dozens of people every day drag themselves to in order to get where they want to go. The train is never the destination, only the means of travel. Only there do I see the sleepiness on their faces before they arrive at work, where they pull out their professional smile and perfect resume and start commanding others what to do. Only there do I see their weary faces and impatient, twitching eyes before they arrive at home, still tired as they walk in the door perhaps but bringing out genuine kindness for the family that they love.

When I take the focus off of myself and place it on others, I realize how truly thankful I am to have found my friends and to have my family by my side. It instills in me a passion for the other lives around me and inspires me to make the most out of the tiny impact that I could have in the life of just one of those seven billion people. True confidence lies in the wonder of the vast world around me. The positive impact that I have in the world may be minuscule, but that’s okay. That means my mistakes are minuscule as well. And if I would have to choose between the two, I’d say that my tiny positive impact will hold a lot more water in the lives around me than my mistakes will, and I think that’s something to be inspired by.

Those people on the train may never know who I am, where I’ve been or where I’m going, but they’ve inspired me, and maybe someday I can inspire them. That’s surely something to be confident about.