Author's Note: This is a response to the prompt: How can you love everybody? Can you love everyone? I tried using syntactic and semantic devices that I've never used before to change it up. Please leave a comment about how I did.
Love is such a cliché word; you can use it to describe how you feel towards your family and you can use to say how you feel towards your neighbor. Sometimes saying the words "I love you" can mean the world to you and sometimes they can just remind you that you have a friend. There's so many levels of love that often an explanation has to follow those simple words. I think maybe sometimes the word "love" is over used. There are those types of people who claim they love everyone and everything. True, it is possible to love everyone, but because it is conceivable doesn't mean that everyone does.
In Great Expectations, Pip is perceived to love everyone, from his sister, to Joe, all the way to the convict in the marshes. Pip is so innocent that doesn't see the convict as bad, he describes him as "my convict". Judging by how he interacts with people, he never displays hatred toward anyone. This may be because he is young and inexperienced, but I think it is just his personality. Pip is a happy, young boy, despite being born into the world with his family already deceased. He has found that to love and to be loved is something that can make him content and have a positive outlook on things. Since he is still young, he has a long journey to go and much more to discover about the act of loving.
Though it is true that I don't love everyone, I try my hardest to love the people that surround me. It says in the Matthew 5:44 "But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,". We all need to try to love our family, love our acquaintances, and love our adversaries. Our days are numbered, and life is like the blink of an eye. We need to love everyone, so that we don't waste our time holding a grudge.
Motivation
Author's Note: This is a response to the prompt: What is Pip's real motivation for bringing the food and the file to the convict who waits for him in the cemetery? I really struggled coming up with an answer to this question, so Mr. Johnson just told explain my thought process and what I thought about that particular part in the book. I, also, tried to incorporate a syntactic and semantic device in the piece and it says in my writing goals on the right.
Sometimes we do things out of fear, sometimes our pure motives are just to stay alive, and sometimes when we are frightened we do things that don't reflect our true personality. In the book, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Pip's world is literally turned upside down by a convict, who forces him to steal from his sister. It was against his will to do such an impractical thing, but out of fear he does it anyway. Knowing that this was wrong, we wonder why would he do such a thing? Was his true motive fear, or was it something else? Something besides what the author says? Truth be told, I'm not sure what his real reason for stealing was, but I do know he comprised his morals for this.
The convict threatened Pip that he would send a another convict after him to kill him. Of course, being the young naïve boy he was, Pip obeyed the stranger and brought him the "whittles" and the file that he asked for. He knew this was wrong, but did it anyway. Therefore he compromised his values and did something knowing it was wrong. When I read this, my first reaction was to say that it is wrong of him to do that and nobody should every steal from their family. Then I realized, if I were to go back and put my feet in his shoes maybe I would have done the same thing. When being frightened with my life, I think I would have just stolen from my family, not because I would want to risk losing their trust, but because just a few pieces of food missing is better than being having to worry about the other convict.
Though we do not know Pip's real motivation for bringing the food to the convict, we can learn that something as little as stealing is never just. One act of disobedience can lead to another act of disobedience to try to cover the initial sin; therefore resulting in something that was never foreseen when the you originally did it. It's like getting lost, if you take one wrong turn you have to take another to get back to the right path. Even once you think you are going in the right direct, you could take a wrong turn any second.
