I've been thinking about this essay. In retrospect, I don't think I should have submitted it. I do think it's well written and poignant, but I don't think it's appropriate for a law school admissions essay. I guess I live and learn. I don't regret ending up in Syracuse--it enabled me to receive a master's degree while going to law school. But if I had to do it again, I would have submitted an essay that pandered to what the admission committee members were probably looking for. My cousins, Lois and Marshall, made such a comment when I gave them the essay to review. So much for listening to the opinions of others. Here it is, anyway, in all its glory:

The blue wind gave way to the cascade of dreams as time stood still flowing through the pathways of night. Memories began to pull against the strands of reality, remembering all that was lost, all that was not yet found. Memories are ethereal, unforgiving, flighty, and yet they are all that we have to know, to understand what we have.

Through the progression of time known as aging, we are given the opportunity to know certain people. To understand a person is a very complicated process of deciphering and breaking down the many walls that make up the person’s costume. But, perhaps the hardest step of this process is in breaking down your own wall. It is in this own self-awareness that a person can begin to mature and grow.

This step happened for me many years ago, at the time of my bar mitzvah — the religious ceremony that proclaimed me a man. It was not this lavish affair that opened me up to the world, but what happened after the affair. My father had been diagnosed with an inoperable form of cancer several years before my bar mitzvah, and it had progressively been getting worse. He died a few months after my bar mitzvah in his bed at our home in Brooklyn.

I had just awakened when I heard commotion outside my closed door. The only sound I can still remember is the humming of the EMS’s walkie-talkie. My mother and sisters came in and told me. They held me as I cried. My mother kept telling me that it was only the shell of my father that had died, that his soul would always live, and that soul would always be with us. But it was this realization of his death, of mortality that was the key that unlocked my own self-awareness.

I read many books while sitting Shivah, the Jewish time of mourning. I began to see things I had never known existed within me and inside the world. It was through this tragic happening that I was able for the first time to understand myself and my existence. The very fact that I did exist had never dawned on me before this. Self-awareness came upon me as a meteor upon the moon, leaving an unexpected and permanent mark. The meteor’s collision resulting from the very pull of my own gravity, leaving a depression upon my surface which changed my entire outlook, my entire life.

The world became clearer during this time, all knowledge was within reach. Many memories came back to me; I relived each of them with a new found awareness. The day my grandfather died I remembered my father sitting down my sisters and me for a discussion of death. He showed us his watch, and pointed out the second hand explaining how this hand measured the time and span of everyone’s life. The length of each life was tied to the tick of each second. I became acutely aware of this tick, of the meaning that I had to find for my own life.

The most notable change in my personality was a new found confidence, and passion for debate. It is only through this mental contest that awareness can be heightened and knowledge gained. Self-awareness gave me this ability to move forward, to question everything from the existence of god, to the physics of time. It propelled me forward through my college career and through my studies of computer science and philosophy. Eventually leading me to pursue a degree in law, in which my passion for knowledge and pursuit of wisdom can find fertile ground in which to grow.

It was this blue wind of change that allowed me to develop as a person; the first major meteorite impact on a surface that I was to learn was mine. Since that time many new impact sights can be found, and I am sure that the brilliance of my oceans will outshine that of the moon’s. I have found that it is only through the continuous struggle and wounding of life that a person can grow to understand the world, to understand life, and most importantly to understand oneself. It is this gift of self-awareness for which I thank my father. His memory lives within me, and I watch each tick of the clock with a new-found respect for the person that he was, but most importantly, that I am.