"Earth and Space, Living World, Human Body, The Way We Live, Science and Technology, History, Atlas of the World"

As I try to remember the first book I ever flipped through, I realize that what happened less than ten years ago seems to be such a colossal eternity ago that I will never be able to connect all the dots of my childhood. Yet I can remember the one thing that piqued my adolescent interest what was going on in the “real world:” an illustrated encyclopedia. Encompassing topics from the human body to space, the massive hardcover put me through many distinct polarizing emotions; one moment I’d be cheerfully captivated by lymph nodes and the next I’d be earnestly pondering my fate after discovering that the universe was nearly 15 billion years old (I’ll admit this made me sleepless on countless night). Being a naïve child, everything I read seemed to be an amazing breakthrough to me.
 Since I was reading the encyclopedia at such a young age, it is obvious that for a large part, I wasn’t really reading; I was actually mesmerizing myself with the hordes of vivid visuals. From the human skeleton to jambalaya, it was all a huge phenomenon to me. But there is one specific drawing that I can hauntingly recall. It was a sketch of the instant before beheading of King Charles I of England. At that age, I was suddenly struck by the devastation of how a powerful king would lose his vision of the earth forever by one swift chop of an axe. Flipping through later, I read a short bit of how Americans fell from “riches to rags” thanks to “stocks.”

What the heck were “stocks?” At the time, I thought to myself, how could anyone lose all their wealth by the “crash” of a single word? Even today, I still do not fully grasp the concepts of economics or “total equity” or Wall Street. Yet there was one thing I held to back then that I still grasp today. I wanted to strive for a decent future. Because reading about the eerie, infinite depths of the universe, of the chilling and swift death of Charles I, and of the scary reality of families going “cold and hungry” because of “stocks,” I realized that my life was fitted and limited. Reading the short blurbs of great historical figures, I noticed how no one lived past ten decades yet everyone had built a destiny for themselves in such a short scope of time. Looking back, I see how this illustrated encyclopedia really molded my perceptions of the world and of my life. I can safely attribute my ambition of my future to my enthrallment at the wonders human body. From the moment I flipped out of the encyclopedia and into the moving and increasingly (though as a kid, not really) real world, I’ve been continually working towards a medical path without getting beheaded by an axe.