Reflection

We gain experience from the things we did in our daily life. Experience helps us to improve ourselves. But in order to make us our experience, we have to reflect it and learn from it.

Hereby I am going to share one of my experience that reflects me a lot, and perhaps, changed my life.

This happened in my Form 3. That time, I am quite an introvert. My greatest fear was public speaking (Well, not fully overcome it now.. yet). I would rather kill myself than speaking through the microphone. Then, I received an invitation to a motivation camp from my senior through Facebook. I registered myself, just because the camp was held in my primary school.

This is the first camp I have ever joined. That time, I was one of the youngest camper, as I was only 15, and some of the others were around 18-20. This made me more shy to speak. In the camp, we had activities such as team building games, drama, community service and so on. After every single activity, we had a reflecting section among our group members, and we need to send a representative to share with ALL the campers in the sharing section. Can you imagine how scared I was? To talk in front of ALL the campers, and half of them were elder than I was! I prayed every time not to be chosen - but everyone had to have their turn.

The inter-group reflection section helped me a lot. My groups members are fun, helpful, and full of interesting ideas. As an example, we had community service in the morning. We were to go around the housing area to pick up any piece of trash along the road, at the same time, give out our handmade bookmarks to people we met. Sounds simple right? The only reflection I could think of was not to simply throw our rubbish because it takes more hard work to pick it up... those we normally learn from Moral Studies.
But these are not all! My group mates amazed me in the reflecting section.
Here are some of their reflections that I can recall...
- We collected a lot of left over food in polystyrene containers. This shows how ungrateful some people are, as there are a lot of people starving out there.
- I never thought we can collect two bags full of trashes in a small housing area! I can't imagine the amount of trashes people threw everyday.
- There are some people who threw glasses and fragile items at the park. This is so dangerous as children that play in the park will easily be hurt, and the homeless people staying there at night will be unaware of the broken glasses.
- I always thought picking up trashing is shameful. But this morning, I was greet by 2 passer-by! They said they are happy to see young people involved in these activities to make the place better. I realize we can easily make a difference to the society if we want to.
- There are some people locked their door immediately when I approached to them to present them our bookmarks. I realized this is what I used to do - shutting every strangers outside without knowing their intentions. This is so sad, even though I know I can't blame them as they are protecting themselves. I hope I can be more thoughtful and try to listen to what others want to say.
- I seldom leave home, not to mention going out for a walk. Walking around the housing area in the morning is so fun and relaxing, especially after we make it clean!

Well, these are some of them, and many more that I cannot recall at the moment. That was the first time in my life I realized that each small thing in our life has its own meaning, waiting for us to discover, and learn them by heart. By compiling these ideas, I went out to share, representing my group. I felt confident with what I can say, the words just came out from my heart. Without noticing, I spoke longer than I expected.

This camp gave me a boost in my confidence and bravery. I become more daring to join activities. I even registered to join the school's public speaking and debate competition. Although I may not good enough to win any prizes, but I didn't regret. Well, at least I have tried! At the end of the year, I registered myself to be interviewed for the Cadet reporter team, and I think this is the best decision I have ever made in my life. I wouldn't have done it without what I learnt from the camp.

I'd rather looking back on my life and say "I don't believe I did that" instead of  "I wish I did that". This is what I have been telling myself since that day.