Belonging Speech Essay Example For Students

Belonging Speech Essay Tim Winton once said â€Å"Our Culture is obsessed about belonging, but people haven’t grasped the notion that you have to earn belonging, to earn some kind of comfort and ease of familiarity with yourself’’. Peter Skrzynecki’s poems Feliks Skrzynecki, St Patricks college and 10 Mary Street reflect this idea through many different ways and in many different contexts such as family, school, home, culture and land. To belong is to feel as though you are a part of something, where you connect with other people, and where you feel a sense of security. Belonging can be individually, within a group, community, society, or the larger world. This sense of belonging can be earned through our family, friends, likes and dislikes, backgrounds and opinions. Peter Skrzynecki uses various language and visual techniques throughout his poems to portray the idea that you have to earn belonging. Several aspects of belonging can also be explored through examining 3. Belonging is a universal necessity to feel needed and wanted within a certain collective of people. The term belonging itself means to have one’s identity accepted despite the similarities or more importantly differences. However, it is these same similarities or differences that define another’s perspective upon whether or not we belong to their social â€Å"norms†, which leads us to the concept of alienation and how it affects our sense of belonging in 4. We may all know belonging as being that which belongs to someone or as something that is connected with a principle or greater thing, but do we really understand what it means to belong as a human being? To belong we have to try to fit in and accept ourselves as a part of something. Sometimes, for the ones who have left their homeland and moved to another country, they may have a sense of not belonging even if the people in that country recognize them as a citizen of the nation. It could be because they don’t look like others by their hair color and appearance or because the languages they speak are not the same. . Perceptions and ideas of belonging, or of not belonging, vary. These perceptions are shaped within personal, cultural, historical and social contexts. A sense of belonging can emerge from the connections made with people, places, groups, communities and the larger world. Within this Area of Study, students may consider aspects of belonging in terms of experiences an d notions of identity, relationships, acceptance and understanding. Texts explore many aspects of belonging, including the potential of the individual to enrich or challenge a community or group. They may reflect the way attitudes to belonging are modified over time. Texts may also represent choices not to belong, or barriers which prevent belonging. Perceptions and ideas of belonging in texts can be constructed through a variety of language modes, forms, features and structures. In engaging with the text, a responder may experience and understand the possibilities presented by a sense of belonging to, or exclusion from the text and the world it represents. This engagement may be influenced by the different ways perspectives are given voice in or are absent from a text. . Belonging is important for our growth to independence; even further, it is important for our growth to inner freedom and maturity. It is only through belonging that we can break out of the shell of individualism and self-centredness that both protects and isolates us. However, the human drive for belonging also has its pitfalls. There is an innate need in our hearts to identify with a group, both for protect ion and for security, to discover and affirm our identity, and to use the group to prove our worthiness and goodness, indeed even to prove that we are better than others.