Query

By Harrison 

            If you work hard, it will feel better when you are done. Alex Scott was diagnosed with a type of childhood cancer shortly before her first birthday. The doctors later informed her parents that if she beat the cancer, it was unlikely that she would ever walk again. By Alex’s second birthday, she was beginning to crawl around and stand with the help of leg braces. Not too long after her fourth birthday, where it looked as if she were beating the odds, she learned that her tumors were growing back. One time when Alex was with her mother, Liz, she said, “When I get out of the hospital I want to have a lemonade stand.” She said she wanted to give the money to the doctors so they could “help other kids, like they helped me.” She stayed true to her word and worked hard to raise an amazing $2,000 for the hospital.

            Word got out that a cancer-diagnosed child was raising money to help other children like her. All around the world, people helped raise money to help Alex with her goal. In August 2004, Alex passed away at the age of 8, but not before raising over $1 million to help find a cure for childhood cancer. Around the world, people continue the legacy of Alex’s Lemonade Stand. What you work hard to do doesn’t always have to be something complex. Sometimes it can be as simple as having a lemonade stand.

This week’s query is: How can you work hard, while staying simple?

Simplicity

"Simplicity is not an alternative life style for a marginal few. It is a choice for the mainstream majority, particularly in developed nations." -Sophisticated Simplicity. You may be asking yourself, Why would I want to know this or What does this mean? Simple, it means that everyone should live simply. Simplicity should be a lifestyle for the majority of people. Unfortunately though, it isn't.

Most people don't even know why simplicity is so important. And those people are the ones who are ignorant of how much money they are spending on things they don't need and will probably rarely use. Simplicity is important. It keeps us focused on what needs to be done, not what we want to get done. Personally, I have found it very hard to get something done when there is a television on. A television is definitely not an necessity.

To me, simplicity means only having what you need, and not going out every month to get the new thing that everyone has. Simplicity is really important to me because I don't think that you need the new thing of everything. I don't think that everyone needs to have the same things, because how do you show who you are if you have the same phone, and the same laptop, and the same iPod.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life. And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not. When I came to the woods to die, discover that I had not lived.”

                                                                                      -Thoreau