Hi,

My name is Tanaka and I think art is the most beautiful thing there is. I think creation is the most beautiful act we are capable of performing, and everything we do is in an attempt to express ourselves and our desire to create, through some medium: art, music, writing, and every other human discipline. Even science. Perhaps especially science. Science goes a step further to examine how we create. Philosophy asks why. It is an act of creation to understand creation itself.

I hope you can tell I like to ask big questions, and attempt to answer them. I fail too, spectacularly- but failing is fine. No good journey is smooth. All boring journeys are though. I could argue that I like asking big questions, especially when I already have the answers and know I have them. Even more so when I do not know the answers I have. It is possible to have something and not know you have it. Do you know what you have? Who you are? Why you are who you are? I want to ask those questions about everything. This semester, in this class, about latin America and the journeys that brought it to today.

This is why I came to Wooster, to find out the answers I already have, and to learn to ask bigger, deeper questions- their nature, and how to answer them- this last one, more than the answers themselves. The answers do not really matter. The journey to a place matters infinitely more than the destination itself. There are many destinations.

I chose Wooster because of the academic curiosity it creates in its students, and the environment that nurtures this curiosity and matures it into questions that matter. Questions that define us and shape our thoughts, fears, actions, lives, and legacies. Wooster chose me. I hope, for reasons similar to mine for choosing it: because there was a choice and there was no choice. It was meant to happen and it was not. But it happened anyway, like the rest of life, and I delight in this fact. That everything I ever hoped for, and ever feared, everything I ever dreamed, and dreaded, is happening at once. And it is oh, so beautiful. Wooster is amazing.

My goal this semester is to grow. In one small way, every single day.

To branch out of my peer group every week, and maintain a relationship with someone familiar, to write an article, (one better than this one I hope.) to read one chapter of that book I never find time for, and to give more than I take.

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If you do not live in the moment, where do you live?