Carry It Forward: The Kite Runner

In English class, we are reading the very powerful "faux memoire", The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. A central theme of this book was apparent to me in chapters seven and eight. After the kite running of the winter of 1975, Amir watched Hassan get raped by the neighborhood bully, Assef. As Amir watched, his mind basically shut down on him, too driven by fear for his own fate to make the decision to help his closest friend. He ran away, not thinking about the future, how the fear would catch up to him, or Hassan's well-being. His only thoughts were for himself.

I felt the power of this choice as I continued reading, and time after time, Amir avoided the conflict. He had dozens of opportunities to tell someone what he had witnessed and perhaps regain some faith in himself; each one passed without significance. You could tell that the truth was eating at him from the inside. He couldn't bear to even see Hassan trying to get his life back on track because it meant Hassan was healing from what he couldn't.

Fear dictated his life. It was apparent to me that he would never heal from this one traumatic experience because he couldn't face it head on. He slid past it repeatedly, but no one can ever run away from a problem for long. This is what I will carry forward into the future from this section of the book.

I know that I am a cautious, calculating, and rational thinker most of the time. I'm almost robotic in my thinking. I see a conflict, I weigh both possible outcomes, and I make a decision based on which path will cause me the least amount of pain. But after reading this section of the book, I see the flaws in the way I think. If I only do what will cause me the least amount of pain, I'm neglecting everyone else. I mean, we're all a little bit selfish, deep down, aren't we? However, it's necessary to do something difficult to lessen the hurt in the long-run for the people you care about.

I see now that I cannot let fear of pain or failure drive my life, because what life is that? Living in fear of everything will rob me of friends, relationships, and experiences, and those have value to me. Therefore, I must carry this into my future, to use for any little problem that makes me want to curl up and hide: The more I run, the longer it takes for the problems to catch up with me, but they will catch up with me in the end, and they'll be much more painful the longer I deter them. It's simply not worth it to deny pain. Bravery in the face of my fears is what must drive my life from now on. It'll be difficult to achieve, but it's completely worth the effort.