College Admissions Essay: The Beginning Of Victory

The Beginning of Victory

As the music seeps through the air of the dark basement theater, my fingers begin to slide up the neck of my guitar. Instinct starts to take over. The notes flow through my veins, swim up the cables, and are flung into the sphere of energy that has formed around the small theater. The spotlight falls onto the closed eyelids of the audience as their steps coincide with the rhythmic beat of the improvisation. My mind slips away from the scene.

The freshly fallen snow clings to the limbs of the evergreen trees, forming a canopy over the path that winds its way up the mountainside behind my home. This is where I go when I need to think. As I hike up the narrow trail, I find solitude in nature. There are no houses to fill my view. There are no super-highways cutting through the middle of the path. Most of all, there are no people. A family of deer freezes to look at me in search of a place where the snow has not covered the grass. Further up the trail I stop to watch as two black squirrels chase each other up and around the skeleton of an aspen tree. Through a hole in the canopy the sun glistens off the snow and warms me. As I break out of the trees, I look up and see the sun perched alone in the sky with not one cloud to hide behind.

A calm, almost mesmerizing jazz progression takes form, and with a slower, more sensuous feeling my body takes command of my instrument once more. I start to drift away again, but this time a different scene surfaces.