English Composition & Literature

How did I Fall and Raise
In all of our lives there are goals we have, values we possess, and strengths and weaknesses that make us who we are. All of us, no matter if we have different backgrounds, personalities, ways of living, or if someone has more luck than others, we sometimes always face the same problems with a different context. Everyone has a unique and individual story, and inside of those stories we experience many diverse events. We have moments of struggle and also of happiness, but all of this makes us learn a lot of lessons along the way, helping us build who we are today. Such can be said about my own life; for a person that is only twenty years old, I faced a lot of different experiences in my life, I had big moments of struggle and also happiness, but the moments that marked me more were the difficult times. So, reading the story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” from Gabriel Márquez, I could make a relation between my life and the principal character the “Angel.” This relation is not about the text itself or the plot, but a simple analysis of the events that surrounded the Angel. We both have faced difficulties, and we also have overcome them. We were two fallen persons that no one expected much from, but we had patience and the perseverance to keep our heads up and at the end rise and fly like an angel.
Sometimes life tests us to see if we are ready for the future that is waiting for us. If we are not ready to face this future, life also puts us in a place so we will learn the lessons to be ready for this future. But, if we fail to accomplish that, we will pass the rest of our lives seeking for something that will never come. When I was fifteen years old, I did not pass the test, and life sent me to a place where I had to face one of the worst moments of my life. A serious knee injury for a soccer player at that age was one of the worst incidents that could happen to me or anyone else seeking the same objective. This happening made me feel that I was falling from a high place and “lying face down in the mud,” which is how the author described the Angel after his fall (294). At that moment, I was living far away from home and my family, in a place with a few friends, and with no expectation to get more. I was feeling as “a lonely castaway,” laying in a foreign place, with no hope, like the Angel when he fell on that strange place where no one could understand him (295). At that time I viewed the event as a curse that someone threw on me, that all of this was not suppose to happen, that it was unfair, that all my future was lost. But that was a really selfish and superficial way of thinking.
It took me a long time to understand that all these things that were happening were a change, a change needed in my life, and that this life lesson made me evolve and grow as a person. Like the fall, the path to my rise was also rough; I faced many difficulties and problems. When I was in the recovery stage, it was a period of time where I could learn many of the most important lessons, like patience. “His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience” (297). The Angel has one of the best virtues someone can have: the virtue to be patient, to give time. Because things will always come in the right time and in the right moment, there is no need to rush and pass over them. This was the most important lesson I learned in my recovery stage, and