I’ve been restless for as long as I can remember. Over time, I’ve come to see my restlessness expressed in ways ranging from the brilliant to flatly destructive. At the depths of my idiocy, I was suspended from my high school for creating a parallel internet network to the one my school had installed because “I thought theirs was inadequate.” I skipped class my senior year to install car stereos with my friends, read books and attend political rallies- and if my high school hadn’t found something oddly endearing about my erratic rebellious streak I would have been flirting with truancy.
On a more positive note, my aimless ambition has taken me on a volunteer-driven gap year that led me from Denver to the Philippines to assist disaster survivors in many ways. I facilitated federal meetings on aid money, and I picked up a sledgehammer to help incredulously upbeat homeowners knock the last wall of their former life down so they can pick up the pieces and get back to the crazy challenge that is life. What I’ve come to realize is that the force that really drives me towards the contentment we all desire is empowering people to realize their unknown potential. Helping to get people back on their feet after a trauma is a magnificently uplifting experience for both the survivor and for the volunteer. I’ve also come to realize more broadly that the restlessness that drives me exists in everyone. From the Divest Activism to Black Lives Matter to our student led mental health push last year, it’s there if we look for it. Many of us may not be so bold or so stupid as to throw metaphorical pots and pans at tin walls to express it as I have- but it’s there.
My passion for Taylor and the SISE program lies in its potential. As our generation has grown up, we’ve seen a cynical world filled with cumbersome politics and bureaucracy that is still somehow beautiful, with people striving for connection and clinging to hope. The epiphany I’ve come in recent years is that (to dive headfirst into cliché) we truly are so much more powerful than we realize. Through my work, I’ve observed organizations such as the Red Cross and World Health Organization in all of their glory, imperfection and awe-inspiring complexity. As unbelievable as it may sound, I’ve come to believe that with passion, discontent and a wee bit of a push in in the right direction, it is possible for us to achieve that same level of impact. In one of my classes, I’ve begun taking serious steps towards developing a hybrid venture that uses funds from corporate and government level disaster mitigation consulting to fund improved warning and information dissemination systems in vulnerable third world countries.
As a Taylor Fellow, I’m helping to develop an interactive student driven way to bring awareness to a wide range of campus problems. We soon will have workshops that work towards translating the multitude of complaints into solutions, bringing parties from all backgrounds to the table to work with unfamiliar partners in innovative ways. I believe this will be a truly valuable step towards empowering the student body, collectively and individually. Through these programs, I’ve awakened to the notion that I can make a difference. Through all of the programs, courses and challenges that Taylor and the campus on the whole offers, we can all pitch in and we can all make a difference. Through education, we can learn to expand the scale of our impact to tremendous heights. I’m happy to say that my restlessness has finally taken me in a productive direction. I’ve realized that we have far too much capability to see ourselves as voiceless. We can do better, and we can be better.
By Derek Bednarski, Event Planning Taylor Fellow