I forgot where I heard this but this has been stuck in my mind these past few days. Let's grab a coffee/tea, sit down, and have a chat.
Diamond: a precious stone consisting of a clear and colorless crystalline form of pure carbon, the hardest naturally occurring substance.
Where I grew up (South Side Jamaica Queens), having diamonds showed class, showed you had money, showed that you knew what it takes to get that diamond on your wrist, teeth, or around your neck. STATUS. In my eyes, you needed to have status to be seen or you were weird. My friends and I all had different things about us that made us stand out from each other. Either it is having nice clothes all the time, the newest Jordans, or different colored eyes (that was me). Some of us were lucky enough to have a family to buy them diamonds whereas some of us resorted to fake ones, we had to look the part right? Personally, I had a belt buckle and dog tags with those fake diamonds, they worked for me at the time.
With diamonds, it's generally said that you need high amounts of pressure to create said diamonds. Also, it's ridiculously challenging to scratch a diamond but they can be broken. So is it worth it being a diamond? High pressure for something that is temporarily large and will reduce over time, it can be fake, and now made in labs. So this brings me to my next point, plastic.
Plastic: a synthetic material made from a wide range of organic polymers such as polyethylene... can be molded into shape while soft and then set into a rigid or slightly elastic form.
Plastic these days has a negative reputation due to plenty of factors that I'm not going to discuss. What I'd like to discuss is the beauty of what plastic was created for and how we all use it! First created in 1907 then highly used during and after World War II. As humans, we created plastic, but from my perspective, we didn't know what was possible with it or how long it would last. We didn't know how it would affect the oceans, animals, society, or our lives. As we grow as humans and our mindsets shift and knowledge grows, we are learning how to deconstruct and repurpose plastics for the better.
It's a man made product that can last forever if nothing is done to it, enhances life but can be desctructive, and is multi-purpose. It takes work to create it but it doesn't require the amount of pressure that diamonds need to be beautiful and to break it down requires a lot of work. Plastic's multiple purpose possibilities are gifts to the world in so many different ways. Not to say diamonds are not multipurpose but the idea of what plastic has done to the world when a man created it is pretty amazing to me.
I've been asking myself, do I resemble a diamond or plastic? I'm beautiful, unique, and enjoy the pressures of life like a diamond but I want my legacy to last generations and to be utilized by millions. I see diamonds as a small collective of people enjoying their beauty but plastic, so many people can enjoy it's benefits. As I'm writing this, I'm constantly thinking of the negative that plastic are leaving on this world but does the bad outweigh the good? Am I also questioning how much I am impacting the world in a positive or negative way? Is there really a positive or negative way I can impact the world? There will always be cause and affect, in this lifetime or the next.
I can only hope what I leave on this world is reveared, beautiful, and useful.
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