2025-2026 Live Deliberately Essay Contest
Arden Lowder, 16
Winner,14-16 age group
Buford, GA
What are you thinking about right now? What’s racing through your mind, demanding your attention? Deadlines? Money? The fact that Taylor and Travis finally set a date?
Currently, I am working on a paper for my English class, studying for a math final which happens to be the day after tomorrow and makes me want to travel back in time and stop Isaac Newton from inventing calculus (though I would probably need calculus to invent a time machine, which adds a whole new level to what’s going on in my brain right now), and writing this essay.
I can’t say it feels particularly simple.
“Our life is frittered away by detail.” Well call me an apple, because I certainly feel my life being frittered away. I happen to love details. Some people can play instruments or sing or draw. My talent is overthinking. I alphabetize our marching band uniforms before each game. Now they’re easier to find. Or they would be, if anyone read the note explaining that they were ordered alphabetically. The math notes I’m currently glancing at with my peripheral vision happen to be thoroughly color-coded and complete with a table of contents.
Thoreau argues for “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”
But I have a counterargument: I’m sixteen years old. Nothing is simple.
From choosing my clothes each morning based on what will make sure I blend in just right to deciding if I should stay up to rewatch Stranger Things again or if I should get eight hours of sleep for the first time since September, everything seems so complicated.
And in between is friend drama, grades, homework, band practice, piano lessons, little sisters, math tutoring, making breakfast, and anything else that can contribute to my stress levels.
The adults in my life treat this stress as “kid problems.” And they’re probably right. When I’m all grown up, my high school GPA won’t seem worth self-harm, like I thought it was a year ago. When I’m all grown up, I won’t remember the name of the crush I had at fifteen who rejected me. My high school problems will stay in high school when I move on.
But I’m still in high school. My “kid problems” are overwhelming for me. My class rank determines my self-worth. With a single sentence, a best friend can send me crying to the bathroom for the remainder of class.
Whether I’m valedictorian or a high school dropout, whether Jae and I sit together at lunch or silently glare across the cafeteria, the world will keep orbiting the sun and the moon will keep orbiting the world and Marvel will keep making movies that just haven’t been the same since Endgame. What I do in high school couldn’t matter less to the big picture.
But, as I said, I’m obsessed with details.
How would it feel to “simplify, simplify”?
I can’t say I’d like to disappear and live in the woods for the next two years (though, if it gets me out of my aforementioned math final, I’ll try anything), but the idea of simplicity sounds wonderful.
A few weeks ago, I had a picnic with some friends. The ground was rocky and the sky was orange with the setting sun and I didn’t know why I was laughing but I couldn’t stop.
This, to me, is the key to simplicity. Laughing without knowing why. There’s a line in the Netflix show Heartstopper that I can’t help but love. It goes, “You don’t have to understand your feelings completely to know that you like something. You don’t have to always have everything figured out. You can just feel.”
I’m sixteen years old. I have nothing figured out.
But I’m learning that’s okay. I don’t need to know who I am yet. I don’t have to be the perfect student or perfect friend or perfect daughter. I don’t need to worry about everything that happened already and everything that hasn’t happened yet.
I can put away my overthinking to live simply and deliberately. I can laugh underneath the sunset. I can cry at a documentary about Pluto. I can fall in love with Thoreau’s writing even when I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about because I can feel beauty and magic pouring from the page.
Living simply isn’t living a life without challenges. Living simply is living in the moment, drinking in every feeling without thinking about the details of something else. That is how I want to live my life.
