It’s been a cou­ple weeks into 2011 and the world is pick­ing up speed again after the hol­i­day down­time. There is a won­der­ful sense of dec­la­ra­tion in the air as res­o­lu­tions and reminders are caught in a vicious cycle of re-creation.

2011 brings about a year of Adult­hood for me. No more school. No more classes. No longer clas­si­fied as “stu­dent” (although we would all agree that we’re for­ever stu­dents of life!) Wis­dom is report­edly Time’s com­pan­ion, as much as I try to resist, I find them my trav­el­ling com­pan­ions as we walk down the path of Adulthood. On my cur­rent jour­ney, I’m drunk with a new found sense of inde­pen­dence and pos­si­bil­ity, the pur­suit of hap­py­ness, dis­cov­ery of my world views and deter­min­ing which paths to take when­ever I hit a crossroad.

So in the begin­ning of 2011, I would like to share this speech John F. Kennedy given in 1966 that 50 years later, is defin­ing the theme for my year.

Excerpts from “A Tiny Rip­ple of Hope” — Robert F. Kennedy, Day of Affir­ma­tion Address at Cape Town Uni­ver­sity, South Africa on 6 June 1966

“…Our answer is to rely on youth — not a time of life but a state of mind, a tem­per of the will, a qual­ity of imag­i­na­tion, a pre­dom­i­nance of courage over timid­ity, of the appetite for adven­ture over the love of ease. The cru­el­ties and obsta­cles of this swiftly chang­ing planet will not yield to obso­lete dog­mas and out­worn slo­gans. They can­not be moved by those who cling to a present that is already dying, who pre­fer the illu­sion of secu­rity to the excite­ment and dan­ger that come with even the most peace­ful progress. It is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary world we live in; and this gen­er­a­tion at home and around the world, has had thrust upon it a greater bur­den of respon­si­bil­ity than any gen­er­a­tion that has ever lived.

“Some believe there is noth­ing one man or one woman can do against the enor­mous array of the world’s ills. Yet many of the world’s great move­ments, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a sin­gle man. A young monk began the Protes­tant ref­or­ma­tion, a young gen­eral extended an empire from Mace­do­nia to the bor­ders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the ter­ri­tory of France. It was a young Ital­ian explorer who dis­cov­ered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jef­fer­son who pro­claimed that all men are cre­ated equal.

“These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the great­ness to bend his­tory itself, but each of us can work to change a small por­tion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be writ­ten the his­tory of this gen­er­a­tion. It is from num­ber­less diverse acts of courage and belief that human his­tory is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of oth­ers, or strikes out against injus­tice, he sends forth a tiny rip­ple of hope, and cross­ing each other from a mil­lion dif­fer­ent cen­ters of energy and dar­ing, those rip­ples build a cur­rent that can sweep down the might­i­est walls of oppres­sion and resistance.

“Few are will­ing to brave the dis­ap­proval of their fel­lows, the cen­sure of their col­leagues, the wrath of their soci­ety. Moral courage is a rarer com­mod­ity than brav­ery in bat­tle or great intel­li­gence. Yet it is the one essen­tial, vital qual­ity for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. And I believe that in this gen­er­a­tion those with the courage to enter the moral con­flict will find them­selves with com­pan­ions in every cor­ner of the globe…”