LIfe as a Festival. ~ Thanks UPEACErs from the bottom of my heart~

English Creative Poem

There is a Japanese proverb saying "after a festival, you feel sentimental."

Festivals create special time and space in which people interact and obtain shared experience with other people.

In festivals, people get out of their daily routine lives, feel something special and share it with other people.

And after the festival, as each of them get back to their daily lives, they miss it, hoping as if it lasts forever.

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Now I'm feeling like that.

Why?




The other day, I graduated from a small small university in country side of Costa Rica called University for Peace: UPEACE. It is a tiny university with about 150 students. Few people know about this university. It is not a well-known university.


My UPEACE life was absolutely like a festival; it was isolated from other world, completely different from daily routine lives that I had had in my life and I shared the same experience with friends from all over the world.





Now, I graduated. So my festival is over.

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Is it?

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Now I think,

can we really draw a line between "festival" and "daily lives"?

Is that a binary between festival and daily lives? Is there a clear line between them?

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We, always interact with other people, create some kind of social relations and deepen it somehow in our normal daily lives.

Daily life is not infinite because we all die at some point. Daily life is a limited time and space in which we try to survive, enjoy and become happy.



In that sense, don't you think that our daily lives are festivals?






Life IS a festival.



Festival ends when our life ends.



If I only have one chance to organize a festival called "LIFE", I wanna make it exciting, enriching and fulfilling. And when the festival is over, I want to feel that I fully enjoyed it.



UPEACE experience added a significant and incomparable event in the schedule of my festival.




It is all because of wonderful people who surrounded me at UPEACE. Nothing else could have made this experience more significant, enriching and moving. I couldn't stop my tears on the last day of my UPEACE life. Not because of sadness but because of thankfulness and appreciation I felt from the bottom of my heart.


First time in my life, I felt profound connection and empathy towards my friends from other culture, language and values.



This is what I wanted for a long time.

This was my dream since I was small.

And this is, I believe, what brings about better change to the world.


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Let's keep having wonderful festival of our life.

And, may we have chance to organize another festival in the future.





Again, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart.

And as some of you already said, here, I commit to bring about better change to the world in my life. I am committed.