essay about the happiest moment in my life

Essay on Happiest Moment in My Life

We all have some happy moments in our life that becomes an everlasting memory for us. It may be the time spent with our loved ones, pets, some brave deed like saving anyone’s life, etc. It may differ from person to person. If I have to narrate about the happiest moment of my life it would not be easy for me. I have many happy moments in my life and therefore it is very difficult for me to remember any one of them that is the happiest one.

Short and Long Essay on Happiest Moment in My Life in English

10 lines essay on happiest moment in my life (100 – 120 words).

1) The happier moments in our lives make a lasting impression on us.

2) The happiest moment in my life was when I was in class 5 th .

3) It was the time of the annual fest of our school.

4) My friends encouraged me to participate in a speech competition.

5) I was very nervous and thought that I will lose.

6) I tried my best and surprisingly got the first position.

7) All the teachers, students, and my parents clapped for me.

8) It was really happiest moment in my life when I received the first prize.

9) Everyone appreciated me and I felt proud.

10) The happiness in my parents’ eyes was the happiest moment of my life.

Short Essay on Happiest Moment in My Life – 250 Words

Introduction

Every past event becomes a memory in our mind. It is because of these memories we can think about the things that have taken place in the past. There are some moments in our life that we wish not to lose ever. These are the happiest or the special moments of life that give us eternal joy.

The joy of having the happy moments in life

We all wish for different things in our life.  When our dreams turn into reality it become the happiest moment of life for many of us. Being successful in getting what we desire brings great joy in our life. There might be many happy moments in the life of an individual but the happiest moment is one that is most pleasing for us. It is not necessary that the happiest moment would have been experienced by every one of us. Therefore, we must try to search for happiness from small-small things in our life. This will help in making our lives happier and healthier.

Happiest moment cherishes us throughout the life

The happy moments are the reason for bringing joy in our life. We always desire that life should be paused when happy moments are there and this time would never go. This is not possible in reality but we can feel cherished after remembering the same. There is a smile on our faces whenever we recall the happiest moment of our life. The memory of the happiest moment can also help us in relieving depression or sad moments of life.

Our life is full of happy and sad moments. The happy moments helps us in getting relaxed from the sorrow of sad moments in our life. Happiness helps in adding light of hope to our lives.

We have tried and have detailed about my happiest moment of life in form of a long essay. We hope it would be quite interesting for you to remember the happiest moment of your life and pen it down on paper. The long essay might help you in getting an idea of writing an essay on this topic.

Long Essay on Happiest Moment of My Life (950 Words)

There are moments in everyone’s life that cherish our body and mind. These moments become the happy moments of our life. Have you ever thought that why these happy events become moments? The answer is very simple that they are everlasting in our memories. We become happy by remembering those moments and might remember those moments throughout our life.

What are Happy Moments?

Happiness and sadness are the two phases of life. Everyone in this world has to experience both phases in their life. Happiness is an emotion that makes us feel good and cherished. There are some moments in our life that provide us immense happiness. We wish that these moments would be long-lasting and never end. It is always noticed that sadness does not long forever and is always followed by happiness. It can be well stated by the proverb “Every cloud has a silver lining”. Happy moments are those that fill us with joy. They are not provided by anyone but are created by us.

My Happiest Moment in Life

I find happiness in very small-small things of my life but these are some moments in my life that bring a smile to my face when I remember them. I can say that they are the happiest moments of my life. I will be telling you about one of the happiest moments of my life. I feel very nice to enumerate this moment of my life.

I was studying in class 10th at that time. It was announced in our school that there is a district-level competition of quiz and poster presentations. It will be involving several schools’ participation. The notices regarding the participation of students in the competition were distributed in every class. I was very excited to take part in the poster presentation. I enrolled my name for the competition.

• Process of selection for the competition – The team that had to represent our school for different competitions was to be selected in the school itself. The first barrier was the selection in school. I was very happy when I got selected for the school team that had to represent our school in the district competition. The presentation has to be given in a group and therefore the final team had been finalized. There were four members in the team including me.
• Pre-Preparation for the competition – Every team member presented their innovative ideas on the topic and lastly after summing up those ideas I prepared the poster. We had prepared three posters on the topic. We made a lot of effort to make our presentation the best one.
• The day of the competition – finally the competition day arrived and we were a little nervous too. We have been taken to the destination of the competition by school bus. The teachers were also accompanying us. We performed our best and delivered the presentation beautifully. I was the group leader and therefore I was more nervous about the results. It was about the reputation of my school. Finally, the competition was over and the results of the competition were declared. It was started by announcing the third prize winner.

My heart started sinking down. Finally, I could not believe it when it was announced that our school has bagged the first prize. We were dancing with joy. I was very happy to make my school proud. Moreover, I was happy because the idea of the presentation was my own. The overwhelming joy of that moment cannot be expressed in words.

• Award distribution event – The winning participants have been invited the next day with the whole family for prize distribution and dinner. This was more exciting for me. I went to the destined place and I along with my team was awarded by the District magistrate. It felt very nice to hear the name of my school at the first position. I handed over the trophy to my vice principal. My parents were very happy for me. We had dinner and enjoyed that evening beautifully with my family and group members. Later I and my team members were praised by the whole faculty of the school including the principal. This news and pictures of the winning teams were also published in the newspaper.

My father was very happy for me and therefore he promised a tour in summer vacations as a reward for winning. We had enjoyed that moment very beautifully. I feel very happy whenever I remember that moment in school.

How can we make our Life Enriched with Happy Moments?

Everybody in this world craves happiness. We cannot buy happiness but can gain it in the small things we do in our life. One such moment might become the happiest moment of our life. Happiness is something that we experience in doing different things in our life.  It is created from the inside. The state of being happy lies in the positivity of our minds. When we accept the reality we enjoy the things granted to us. This brings happiness to our lives. This particularly means that we have to learn to live our life. This will induce hundreds of happy moments and make our life a beautiful experience.

It was one of the happiest moments in my life that thrills and cherishes me from inside whenever comes to my mind. I was very happy to bring glory to my school. Moreover, I got rewarded for what I have wished and made my parents happy. I try to forget all my problems by remembering the happy moments of my life. This helps in making me more confident and optimistic to face different types of situations in my life.

FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions

Ans . Happiness is connected with the state of mind.

Ans . The bright colors like yellow, orange, pink and red.

Ans . The secret of happiness lies in loving everything around us and living every moment of our life.

Ans . Yoga helps in reducing our stress, anger, anxiety and thus makes us happier.

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Essay On Happiest Moment In My Life

Table of Contents

short Essay On Happiest Moment In My Life

As an AI language model, I don’t have personal experiences or emotions, but I can imagine that the happiest moment in one’s life can be a moment of personal triumph, a moment of love and connection with others, or a moment of pure joy and contentment.

One of the most memorable moments in a person’s life could be a major accomplishment, such as graduating from school, landing a dream job, or winning a competition. These moments of personal triumph bring a sense of pride, satisfaction, and validation of one’s hard work and effort.

Another source of happiness is spending time with loved ones. Whether it’s a family gathering, a wedding, or simply spending time with close friends, these moments of love and connection with others bring a sense of joy and comfort.

Finally, moments of pure joy and contentment, such as watching a beautiful sunset, listening to music, or enjoying a hobby, can bring a deep sense of happiness. These moments can provide a break from the stress and responsibilities of everyday life, and allow us to simply relax and enjoy the moment.

In conclusion, the happiest moments in life can come from a variety of sources and are unique to each individual. Whether it’s a moment of personal triumph, love and connection with others, or pure joy and contentment, these moments bring a sense of happiness and fulfillment that can last a lifetime.

long Essay On Happiest Moment In My Life

Everyone has those special memories in life that stand out and make them smile. From small moments of joy to the greatest accomplishments, we all have something that brings us happiness. In this article, I explore my own happiest moment in life and reflect on what made it so special. By sharing my story, I hope to inspire you to find your own most treasured memory and appreciate the magic of happy moments.

Introduction

It was the happiest moment of my life when I received my college acceptance letter. It felt like all of my hard work had finally paid off and I was one step closer to achieving my dream of becoming a doctor. That moment was made even happier by the fact that I was accepted into my first choice school, which meant that I would be able to stay close to home and continue playing for my high school’s lacrosse team. The happiest moment of my life was not only a product of my hard work and dedication, but also the love and support of my family and friends. My parents have always been my biggest support system and have helped me through every step of the college application process. From helping me stay organized to providing much-needed moral support, their unwavering belief in me has been instrumental in getting me to where I am today. My friends provided me with endless encouragement during this stressful time in my life, making sure that I had someone to talk to about all of the anxieties associated with applying for college.

Overall, the happiest moment in my life was a combination of years of hard work culminating in one defining moment. It was a moment that I will cherish forever as it showed me that when I put my mind to something, anything is possible.

Childhood memories of my happiest moment

I was 6 years old when it happened. It was a sunny day, and I remember running around in the backyard with my friends. We were laughing and playing games, and I felt so carefree and happy. Then, out of nowhere, a gust of wind came and blew my hat off. I chased after it, but it was caught by a tree. I climbed up to get it, and when I reached the top, I felt like I was on top of the world. That moment was one of pure happiness, and it’s something that I’ve never forgotten.

How I felt at the time

I was on top of the world. I had just won the state championship in track and I was feeling invincible. I thought to myself, “There’s nothing that can bring me down now.” I was so proud of myself and my accomplishments. I felt like I could do anything.

What I learned from that experience

In that moment, I learned that happiness doesn’t come from material things or from other people. Happiness comes from within. It comes from your own thoughts, your own perceptions, and your own actions.

I also learned that the happiest moments in life are often the simplest ones. It’s not about big events or grand gestures. It’s about the little things that make you smile, the things that make you feel alive.

So, what can you do to create more happiness in your life? Start by paying attention to your thoughts and your perceptions. Be mindful of the words you use to describe your life and your experiences. Choose to see the positive in every situation, even when it’s difficult. And take action towards your goals and dreams. When you do these things, you’ll start to experience more happiness in your life – guaranteed!

The impact this moment had on my life

This moment was very impactful for me because it was the first time I had ever felt truly happy. I had always been a pretty happy person, but this moment was different. It was like all of the sudden everything in my life made sense and I knew what I wanted to do with my life. This moment changed everything for me and set me on a new path that I am still on today.

The lessons it taught me about joy, contentment, and gratitude

It was the happiest moment of my life when I received my college degree. I had worked hard for four long years and it had finally paid off. The sense of accomplishment and joy I felt was indescribable. It was at that moment that I realized the importance of setting goals and working hard to achieve them.

That experience taught me three very important lessons: the first is that joy comes from within; it is not dependent on external circumstances. Second, contentment is possible even when life isn’t perfect; we can find happiness in the simple things if we just take the time to appreciate them. And lastly, gratitude is one of the most important emotions we can feel; being thankful for what we have, no matter how small, can make a big difference in our overall attitude and outlook on life.

All in all, the happiest moment of my life was when I achieved my dream of graduating college with honors. It was a moment filled with joy and pride that I will cherish forever. Though it took hard work and dedication to get there, it has ultimately made me into who I am today: a confident individual striving for success and happiness in life. No matter what obstacles come our way, we should always remember this important lesson: no dream is impossible if you put your heart and soul into achieving it!

Manisha Dubey Jha is a skilled educational content writer with 5 years of experience. Specializing in essays and paragraphs, she’s dedicated to crafting engaging and informative content that enriches learning experiences.

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Essay on Most Memorable Moment Of My Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on Most Memorable Moment Of My Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Most Memorable Moment Of My Life

My unforgettable day.

One day stands out in my memory more than any other. It was the day I won the school science fair. I had worked on a project about plants for weeks. My heart was full of hope but also fear.

Feelings of Joy

When they called my name as the winner, I felt a rush of happiness. My friends clapped and my parents smiled proudly. That moment was special because I saw my hard work pay off.

Lasting Impact

That day taught me to believe in myself. It will always be a cherished memory that reminds me of the joy of achievement.

250 Words Essay on Most Memorable Moment Of My Life

Introduction.

Everyone has moments in their life that stay in their heart forever. For me, the most memorable moment was when I won a school race. It was not just about running fast, but about overcoming my fears and proving to myself that I could do it.

The Big Race

Victory and joy.

As I crossed the finish line, I heard my name being shouted by my friends and teachers. I had won the race! It was a shock because I had never thought I could win. I felt so happy and proud of myself. My friends hugged me, and my teachers praised me. It was a wonderful feeling.

Lesson Learned

That day, I learned that it is important to try, even if you are scared or think you can’t win. Winning the race gave me confidence and taught me that hard work and belief in oneself are very powerful.

The day I won the race is the most memorable moment of my life. It showed me that I could achieve great things. Now, whenever I am scared to try something new, I remember that day and feel brave again. It was a simple race, but it changed how I see myself and the world.

500 Words Essay on Most Memorable Moment Of My Life

Introduction to my most memorable moment.

Every person has a few moments in their life that stick with them forever. These are the times that bring a smile to our faces when we think back on them. For me, the most memorable moment was when I won the first prize in a school art competition.

The Day of the Competition

It was a sunny day, and the school hall was buzzing with excitement. Students from all grades had come together to show their artistic skills. I remember feeling a mix of nerves and excitement as I laid out my paints and brushes. My heart was beating fast, and my hands were a little shaky. I took a deep breath and started to paint, trying to put all my feelings and thoughts onto the paper.

The Challenge

Time flies by.

As I got more into the painting, I forgot about everything else. It was just me, my brushes, and the canvas. Before I knew it, the teachers were announcing that time was up. I stepped back and looked at my work. It was a scene of a sunrise over the mountains with birds flying in the sky. I was proud of it, but I didn’t know if it would be enough to win.

The Announcement

After what felt like forever, the judges came in with their decision. They called out the names for the third and second places. My heart sank a little with each name that wasn’t mine. And then, they called out the first place, and it was my name! I couldn’t believe it. I walked up to the stage, my legs feeling like jelly, to receive my prize. The applause from my friends and teachers filled the room. It was the best feeling ever.

The Impact on Me

The memory of winning the art competition is something that will always be a part of me. It was a day when I overcame my fears, put my skills to the test, and came out victorious. It taught me valuable lessons about hard work, passion, and self-belief. This moment will forever be a source of happiness and inspiration in my life.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

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A Memorable Day in My Life [100, 120, 150, 200-250 Words]

A Memorable Day in My Life: W all have at least one memorable day in our life. In this article, you are going to learn how to write a paragraph or an essay on ‘a most memorable day in my life’. Here you’ll get to read 4 paragraphs on this topic (100, 120, 150, 200-250 Words). These paragraphs will be helpful for the students from class 1 to class 12. So, let’s begin.

Table of Contents

A Memorable Day in My Life: 100 Words

During the summer vacation, I visited Mussoorie with my parents. I had never been to Mussoorie before. So it was a new experience for me. Everywhere there was a great hustle and bustle. The weather was very pleasant. Mussoorie is Rightly called the ‘Queen of Hills’. It transports one into a heaven of joy.

My parents took me to Lal Tibba, the highest point in Mussoorie. Lal Tibba provides a mesmerizing view of Himalayan mountain peaks. I was mesmerized to see beautiful scenery and high mountains. We also visited Happy Valley, Kempty Falls and Mussoorie lake. Visiting Mussoorie was the most memorable incident in my life.

Memorable Day of My Life: 120 Words

Last month, our school arranged a trip to the Taj Mahal, Agra. The beauty of the Taj Mahal seemed to have no parallel.  It is made of white marble on the bank of the river Yamuna. The garden in front of it has tall cypress trees, colourful flowers, and rows of mountains. Many precious gems and stones are seen set on the tomb.

I found in the Taj Mahal the artistic and cultural heritage of India. Every stone of this building tells the story of the true love of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz. The white marble structure unrolled before me a new world of beauty. It is, indeed, matchless in beauty and grandeur. That’s why it is considered one of the seven wonders of the world. I was greatly charmed by its beauty. I felt breathless for a white. It was undoubtedly the most memorable day of my life.

Also Read: Paragraph on My Aim in Life 

Most Memorable Day of My Life: 150 Words

A memorable incident is an incident which leaves an everlasting impression on our minds. The most memorable incident of my life is when I got an opportunity to exhibit my talent on stage in front of a huge audience. I always dreamt of becoming a singer. As a kid, I used my toothbrush as the mike and treated my dolls as my audience.

I was enrolled in a vocal training course in an eminent singer’s singing class and from there, based on my performance I was selected to display my skills at the Zee Sa Re Ga Ma Pa. Initially, I was a bit nervous, but got over it soon when I heard the tune. My performance was well received and the audience acclaimed me with their applauds and kept yelling “once more”. The incident made me feel on top of the world.

Also Read: My School Paragraph in English

Memorable Day of My Life Essay: 200-250 Words

A moment which is sweet lasts long in our memory. I distinctly remember the day. My H. S. examination was over and I was having a relaxed time. One day, after spending the afternoon with my friends, I returned home.

My parents were waiting for me. Sister also came running. She was carrying a big envelope in her hand. They all seemed to be very excited and their faces bore reflections of animated joy. My sister shouted that there was a good news for me in the envelope and she would not tell unless she got a heavy bakshis.

After much cajoling, I could get the letter. Lo and behold! It was the admission letter from the I.I.T, Kharagpur. My joy then knew no bounds, I did quite well in the joint entrance examination. But to get selected finally in the highly competitive all-India test was something none could be sure of. In fact, I was a little tense to know the result.

Parents blessed me for my success. Neighbours also came. They all congratulated me again and again. I was lost in golden dreams. At last, I was going to join an institution of international fame! It was the happiest and most memorable day in my life because my future career got a definite direction that day. But that happy day taught me a lesson, too. I made up my mind to work hard in order to be successful in my career.

Read More: 1. Paragraph on My Best Friend 2. Paragraph on Discipline in English 3. Paragraph on Early Rising 

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My Happiest Moment Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Family , Students , Life , Parents , Friendship , High School , Happiness , Education

Published: 12/31/2019

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Extremely joyful and sorrowful events act as turning points in the life of a human being. There are events that one easily forgets about, yet there are those that one has to remember whatsoever. My high school graduation day is one of such moments that has remained engraved in my mind and stands out as the happiest moment in my life. I consider this my happiest day for several reasons. Life in high school had been a long and adventurous journey that has exposed me to different challenging, as well as inspiring moments and environments. Although I was aware that I would never meet some of my friends and schoolmates, I remained happy and overwhelmed with joy on this day. It marked the very last day of several years of being in high school. Before it finally came, I had dreamt and fantasized about for a long time. Notably, I had counted days that turned into months, years until this day finally came. The fascinating reality was undoubtedly the best experience of all that I ever had through time. Having been in high school for the past fourteen years, the experience had been indeed memorable. I recalled the exciting football matches, the choir competitions and speech tournaments that I would miss. I had a mixture of joy and sorrow that all amounted into the happiness of a great achievement. Some of my friends had turned into close associates. Brothers and sisters who helped me overcome difficulties of life. They were more than mere friends and classmates. I was getting to the reality that all these had been to prepare me for a future. All these were meant to make me the achiever I had become. A mature individual who is endowed with skills relevant in light of a better future life. Having exemplified the ability to overcome various challenges, it was certain that my fellow graduates and I were bound to succeed in the future. As Eleanor Roosevelt puts it, “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” I was looking at the world from this point of view. Closing one chapter of wonderful experiences to give room to a new, fascinating chapter that held several unknown and untold stories. I knew I was prepared for it. I had dreams, and I was ready to go after my dreams. College, where I am right now was my first and immediate priority. Life has not been difficult in college as a result of my wonderful high school experience. As I stood in front of my graduation congregation to give my speech, joy flowed through me. I expressed gratitude to my parents for being the best parents I ever had. For helping me through high school, and for counseling me every time, I acted wrongly. I thanked my teachers. Severally, they had to play the role of my parents. Now they had become inseparable friends. They encouraged me to be ambitious and remain the diligent individual I had been. Then it was my classmates. This was to be followed by two parties; one in school and the other at home. The wonderful food, drinks and the bonding of all students, teachers and parents, was one of my lifetime. I was driven home in a decorated convoy to find a banquet organized in the house. After all the celebration and words of encouragement, I was happy for several facts. I learnt I was loved. I learnt I had a duty in life, and it was my responsibility to fulfill this responsibility. Undoubtedly, this was the happiest moment of my life.

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Happiest Day of My Life Essay for Students in English [Easy Words]

January 15, 2021 by Sandeep

The Happiest Day of My Life Essay: Some days are memorable and cherished for a lifetime. A rare moment on a special day undoubtedly becomes the happiest day in a person’s life. It brings joy and happiness to the person and creates room for celebration. Enthusiasm fills in the person’s heart, and his happiness seems to have no barriers. Prosperity, success, achievement and accomplishments are well-defined moments when we feel the happiest.

Essay on Happiest Day of My Life in 500 Words

Below we have provided Happiest Day of My Life Essay in English, suitable for class 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10.

“ Happiness does not depend on what we have; it depends on how we feel towards what we have. We can be happy with little and miserable with much.” ~ William D. Hoard

Fighting with our friends is a now and then activity. But what is even more common? Having arguments with our parents. I am going to tell you about an episode that happened in my life when I was in the 10th standard. I used to go to my tuition classes from 5 pm to 7 pm every Monday to Friday. One evening, when I was walking down the stairs of the tuition centre, my friends and I decided to stop and eat ice cream. I knew my taste buds were about to be delighted!

After finishing my ice cream, I bid farewell to my friends, took an auto and reached home. I could see my mother standing at the gate and my father about to start the car. My mother’s eyes were watery. But I could sense that she breathed a sigh of relief the moment she saw me. As soon as I entered the drawing-room, my mother and my father walked in behind me. They were now looking at me angrily.

They started shouting at me. They asked me why I was late and why I hadn’t informed them. My parents said that they were extremely worried about me. My mother told me that she couldn’t stop thinking that something terrible had happened to me. My father reminded me that in a city like Delhi, where the crime rate is so high, I ought to be more careful and responsible. I felt irritated and agitated by their sudden outburst.

I still remember the exact words that I uttered out of my mouth, “When did eating an ice cream become such a big crime? Why do you have to overreact all the time? I wish I didn’t have parents; maybe then I would’ve been entitled to some freedom. It is impossible to live with you.” My parents turned silent, and I went stomping into my room.

The next day my father told us to get into the car, but he didn’t disclose where we were going. Everyone remained silent for the whole trip. In about 25 minutes, the car came to a halt in front of an orphanage. I did not know what my father had in mind. We all made our way into the orphanage, and my father told me to interact with the kids there.

All the kids at the orphanage were very welcoming and warm. None of them had any parents. A lot of them told me their stories. Reshma, a girl of 10, said to me that her mother died while giving birth to her and she never saw her dad. She was brought here when she was just a baby.

An orphanage is not the most amusing place. The rooms there were small and cramped. They did not have an air conditioner or even a cooler. None of them had been to a restaurant or an amusement park. They rarely got a cake or chocolates to eat. None of the toys that they had was in good condition. Sneha, another girl at the orphanage, told me that there were many nights when she felt lonely.

She told me, “Not one day has passed when I haven’t missed my parents. I would give anything in the world to be with them for just one day.” I realized that the things we take for granted, they dream of them. I walked out towards the main gate and saw my parents talking to the caretaker. I had never been happier to see them. That day I learnt the value of having parents, the importance of having a family.

I ran towards my mother, hugged her and burst into tears. That day was the best and indeed the happiest of my life. I realized that my parents would always be there for me. They would stand beside me through thick and thin. Having parents is not simply normal; it is a blessing which not everyone gets. I apologised to my parents for the previous night’s behaviour and thanked my father for teaching me this lesson.

My father told me something in my ear, and I quickly ran towards the car. I opened the trunk and retrieved a big box of chocolates and candies. My mother also came to help me with the other package which had crayons and colouring books in it. I distributed these things among the children at the orphanage with my own hands. I can’t possibly describe how happy and delighted they were.

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Happiest Moment In My Life - Free Essay Examples and Topic Ideas

Happiest moments in one’s life are subjective and unique to each individual. It could be a milestone achievement, a meaningful connection with someone, a moment of personal growth, or simply a peaceful moment of contentment.

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• The best moments of my life don’t make it to social media
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• The happiest moment in my life was when I got my first car.
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The Happiest Day Of My Life Essay 250 Words

Today, I’m going to take you on a journey to a day filled with sunshine and joy – the happiest day of my life! It’s like a storybook moment that I’ll always hold close to my heart.

Table of Contents

The Happiest Day of My Life: A Memory to Treasure

The happiest day of my life began with a feeling of excitement in the air. It’s like the night before a big adventure. I woke up with a smile on my face, knowing that something special was about to happen.

A Surprise Awaits – The Unexpected Gift

Little did I know that this day was going to be extraordinary. It’s like finding a hidden treasure in an ordinary day. My family had planned a surprise trip to the zoo, a place I had always dreamed of visiting.

The Journey Begins – On the Road to Happiness

As we headed to the zoo, my heart was filled with anticipation. It’s like setting sail on a ship of wonder. I imagined all the amazing animals I would see and the adventures that awaited.

Meeting New Friends – The Animal Kingdom

The moment we entered the zoo, it was like stepping into a magical world. I saw lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!). It’s like meeting new friends who were part of an incredible animal kingdom. Their beauty and grace left me in awe.

A Picnic Surprise – Lunchtime Delight

My family had prepared a surprise picnic lunch. It’s like a feast fit for royalty. We enjoyed sandwiches, fruit, and my favorite chocolate chip cookies. Eating amidst the sounds of nature was a delightful experience.

Fun and Laughter – Adventures at Every Turn

The zoo was full of adventures. It’s like a treasure trove of laughter and excitement. I saw playful monkeys swinging from trees, colorful parrots chattering away, and even had the chance to feed a friendly giraffe.

A Special Encounter – Meeting My Favorite Animal

The highlight of the day was meeting my favorite animal, the panda. It’s like a dream come true. I watched in awe as the panda chewed bamboo and played around. It felt like the panda and I shared a secret connection.

The Joy of Learning – Zoo Facts Galore

The zoo wasn’t just fun; it was educational too. It’s like a classroom in the great outdoors. I learned about conservation, animal habitats, and the importance of protecting our planet. It inspired me to care for our environment.

A Day of Bonding – Family Love

The happiest day of my life was also a day of bonding with my family. It’s like strengthening the ties that hold us together. We laughed, explored, and created memories that will forever be etched in our hearts.

The Sunset of Happiness – Heading Home

As the sun began to set, it was like the perfect ending to a perfect day. I felt tired but incredibly happy. It’s like watching the curtain close on a magical performance. We headed home, knowing that this day would live on in our memories.

Conclusion: A Day to Remember

The happiest day of my life was like a gift wrapped in joy and surprise. It’s a memory that warms my heart on even the coldest days. The smiles, the laughter, and the sense of wonder made it a day I’ll cherish forever.

Author’s Note:

I hope you enjoyed reliving the happiest day of my life with me! It’s like opening a treasure chest of memories. If you want to share your own special moments or chat about anything else, just let me know!

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

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Happiest Day of My Life Essay | Short & Long | 100, 150, 200, 300 and 400 + Words | Power of Happiness

Happiest Day of My Life Essay

We have provided below short and long examples of happiest day of my life essay for your information. After going through these essays you will be able to compose write any short and long essays on best day of my life. Go through and start understanding how we write essay on happiest day in my life.

Happiest Day of My Life Essay- 100 Words

The happiest day of my life was when I turned twelve. It was a bright and sunny day, and everything felt perfect. I woke up with excitement bubbling inside me, knowing that today was my special day. As I walked downstairs, my parents greeted me with a big smile and a birthday cake adorned with candles. I blew out the candles, making a wish deep in my heart. Later, my friends came over, and we played games, laughed, and ate delicious food. The joy in my heart was overflowing, and I felt surrounded by love. That day, I received many presents, but the best gift was the happiness I felt in every moment. It was a day filled with laughter, joy , and memories that will stay with me forever. The happiest day of my life was a day I will always cherish.

Happiest Day of My Life Paragraph- 150 words

The happiest day of my life was when I won the school spelling bee. It was a sunny day, and I was nervous but excited. I stood on the stage with butterflies in my stomach. The principal announced the words. I spelled each word carefully. I was a little nervous also and my heart was pounding with every letter. The competition was tough, but I stayed focused and gave it my all. Finally, the moment came when I spelled the last word correctly. The audience erupted in applause, and I couldn’t believe it—I had won! My parents cheered loudly, and my friends ran up to congratulate me. It was an amazing feeling to win the competition. I was on top of the world. That day, I felt proud of my hard work and determination. It was a day I will always remember with a big smile on my face.

10 Lines on the Happiest Day of my Life

• The happiest day of my life was when I woke up to a surprise party just for me!
• There were colorful balloons, a delicious cake, and all my friends shouting with joy!
• I received wonderful presents and we laughed and laughed, making my heart feel light.
• We played so many fun games, and I couldn’t stop smiling, oh what a delight!
• My mom and dad’s love shone brightly like a twinkling star in the sky.
• When I blew out the candles, I made a special wish, hoping it would reach up high.
• Everyone gave me big hugs and wore the biggest smiles, love filled the air all around.
• It was the best day ever, filled with laughter, fun, and joy that we found.
• I felt so lucky and grateful, like I was the happiest kid in the whole wide world.
• That day will always be my favorite memory, my happiest day, where happiness unfurled .

Essay on Happiest Day in My Life- 200 Words

The happiest day of my life was when my science project won first place at the school science fair . It was a day filled with excitement and anticipation. For weeks, I had worked tirelessly on my project, conducting experiments, researching, and putting together a captivating display. When the day of the science fair arrived, I set up my project with care, making sure everything was in place. As the judges went around, I explained my project with enthusiasm and confidence. When the time came for the awards ceremony, my heart raced with nervousness. The principal took the stage and started announcing the winners. When he called my name for first place, my eyes widened in disbelief. I had done it! A surge of happiness rushed through me, and I could hardly contain my joy. My parents beamed with pride, and my classmates cheered for me. It was an unforgettable moment. Receiving the first-place trophy was an incredible validation of my hard work and dedication. It made me realize that with determination and passion, I could achieve anything. That day, I felt a sense of accomplishment that was unparalleled. It was a day that taught me the power of perseverance and ignited my love for science even more. The memories of that day will forever hold a special place in my heart.

Essay on Happiest Day in My Life – 300 Words

Such happiest days in one’s life are quite a few and rare. They come once in a blue moon. They do not visit us every day. If someday is `happiest’ for someone, it may be ‘saddest’ for somebody else. All days are not equal. Some may be quite cheerful. Others may be sorrowful. Life is visited by weals and woes by turn. If you are sad today, you may be pretty glad the next day. Someone wins a lottery on a particular day. That day becomes for him the happiest day of his life. One gets plucked in the examination; he calls this day as the most miserable. But in my life, the happiest day is 17th September. I was born on this day. It was on Saturday. People take pride in their birthdays. They attach special importance to such days when they saw the light of the day. So for me, my birthday is a significant day. Relatives and friends come to me. They share my happiness. They partake cake, sweets and dinner. Choicest dishes are prepared. The house is decorated, electric bulbs and tubes are lighted. Canopy is hung. Mats, carpets and rugs are spread out. The cake is ordered. It is brought and cut. All wish me a happy birthday. They cheer me, they sing songs, they dance. The whole atmosphere pervades with joy. I become the hero of the day. Eat and drink goes on long in the night. Gifts and presents are heaped on me. I feel excessively jubilant and gay. I celebrate this day with great pomp and show. I wait for this day for days together. Every year this date reminds me that I am older by one year. It is a day of reckoning (thinking) for me. I assess my success and failure. I take account of my failings. I resolve to be just and considerate. I vow to be sincere to my friends, relatives and my country. It is a day of great rejoicings and merry-makings for me and for my family. Every year this day is the happiest day of my life. My happiness is unbounded. It is limitless. It has its own charms and attractions. Hove this day very much; but sorry it comes once in a year.

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Happiest day of my life essay- 450 words.

There is hardly any living being who has never gone through ups and downs in his life. Life is full of incidents both good and bad. Some of them may be forgotten with the passage of time whereas others leave an everlasting imprint on the mind. One feels delighted when fortune favours one but one plunges into despair during misfortunes. A wise man is one who is neither overjoyed in prosperity nor takes adversity to heart. Last year, I passed the Senior School Certificate Examination. Though I had given it my best shot, I was not confident of scoring too well. Anything less than a first division would certainly throw a spanner in the path of my future career. The day before the result was expected, I spent a restless night. Early next morning, I along with a few friends hurried to school and went straight to the display board. Starting at eye level I went down the list, with my heartbeat going up as I reached the bottom. My name was not there. With a heavy heart, I ran my eyes up to the list. And there! I looked again. Yes, it was my name—second in the list. Not only had I secured the first division, but also stood second in my class. God fulfilled my desires. I felt grateful to Him. My friends also passed, securing good marks. In order to celebrate our success, we decided to go to a picnic. We reached Okhla, a lovely picnic resort, at 12 noon. The heavy rush of visitors could not deter our enthusiasm as we sought out a huge banyan tree on the banks of the canal. We spread out our mats and opened up the food hamper. The lively music and delicious food swept away all the tension of the past few days. The idyllic atmosphere was abruptly broken by some loud cries. The sound came from the canal side. I immediately rushed towards the canal and was shocked to see a boy drowning. He was crying for help. I jumped into the canal and swam towards the drowning boy. After a great struggle, I dragged him towards the bank. He was in a very bad state. When I observed him carefully, I was surprised to see that he was an old classmate of mine. He was given medical aid and after some time, he regained consciousness. I was delighted to see him recovering. My joy knew no bounds because I had saved the life of a boy, who happened to be my old classmate. It was a day of great joy and happiness. Not only did I secure the second position, but also did a brave and noble act by saving a boy from the jaws of death. This day would go down as one of the happiest days of my life.

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• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life

500 Words Essay On Memorable Day of My Life

We have different types of days in our lives, some are ordinary while some are special. There are some days that get etched in our memories forever. Likewise, I also have a memorable day of my life that is very dear to me. The memories of this day are engraved in my heart and will remain so forever.

My Birthday- Memorable Day of My Life

My tenth birthday is the most memorable day of my life. It is a day I can never forget and I consider it to be the best birthday yet. The day started just like any other normal day. However, as it kept progressing, a lot of exciting things began to happen.

I woke up very early on my birthday because I had to dress up in casual clothes for school . The day before, all my candies were ready that I would distribute in the classroom.

My mother prepared my favourite breakfast and gave me a big chocolate bar for lunch as well. I went to school and the whole class sang for me and congratulated me. It was the turn to distribute sweets.

My best friend and I went to all the teachers to distribute toffees and we had a great time there. Moreover, it was an incredible feeling. My friends were all singing for me and eager to come to my birthday party later in the evening.

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My Birthday Party

The birthday at my school was memorable but the birthday party at my home made the day even more memorable. Also, my mother invited all my friends from school and the colony to the party.

I received so many presents and we played a lot of games. We played games like musical chairs, tag, egg-and-spoon races, and more. There were so many songs playing so everyone did a special dance too.

The highlight of my birthday party was definitely my huge birthday cake. As I love superheroes, my mother got the cake customized with the superhero theme. It was very tasty too and in my favourite flavour.

I spent a lot of time with my family and friends that day. Everyone liked the return gifts as well and went home with a big smile on their faces.

Conclusion of Essay on Memorable Day of My Life

Therefore, my tenth birthday is the most memorable day of my life. It has given me so many happy memories that will remain with me forever. That day makes me feel blessed and lucky to have all those things in my life.

FAQ on Essay on Memorable Day of My Life

Question 1: What is the meaning of a memorable day?

Answer 1:   When we say memorable, we refer to something that we cannot forget easily or something that left us excited. A memorable day is a day that one can recall easily as it is engraved in the memory.

Question 2: What can be an example of a memorable day?

Answer 2: Some people consider their birthday to be the most memorable day. While some consider it a family trip too. Similarly, some people may find their school picnic or fete to be the most memorable day.

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My happiest moment in my life

There are many happy moments in my life but i will describe here my importent life event.3 years back when my brother and my sister got married.there was so elacrity among all the family members and i was waiting for this day for a long time ago.we went for shopings.did every thing.more then 150 guests were invited at our house.our house is not so big but we managed it in 3 stories.on the mehendi function we all cousins,friends did bhangra,dance,put mehendi,it was a mehendi function of my bro and sis.their friends were also invited and it was also combine mehendi between three inlaws at our place .Function was end at 3am.Different singers were also invited at the function spot.so over all it was mine happiest moment in my life

1/10 oh no! This is not an essay. This is a mere message

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530 words short essay on the Happiest Moment in My Life

Free sample essay on the Happiest Moment in My Life. Every man in his life faces the ups and downs. Sorrows and pleasures are two parts of life. In fact, life is full of bad as well as good incidents.

Some of them are forgotten with the passage of time while others leave an everlasting impression on the mind. We do not forget them for the whole of our life. We enjoy the moments of pleasure while the moments of sorrow plunge us into despair. We cherish the moments of pleasure throughout our life.

Such a moment came to me last year when I learnt that I had stood first in the examination. It was really the happiest moment. It appeared that I have won the whole world. Though I had fared well in the examination, yet I was not hopeful of getting a first class. In fact, I was anxious for the result as some of the papers were not up to my expectation. As it was to lay the foundation of my career, it all the more added to my tension. Hence the moment I learnt about the result, I was relieved of all my tension. I was satisfied that I can give a proper direction to my career as per my wishes. I first of all thanked God for His kindness. He fulfilled my desires. I was pleased because all my friends have also ranked good marks. To celebrate our pleasure I, along with my other friends, chalked out a programme. We decided to go out for a picnic. We decided to go to Surajkund.

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Next day we started for Surajkund at 10 a.m. We reached there in two hours because there was heavy flow of traffic. The picnic spot was also crowded. As it was a sunny weekend of winter, there were lots of people who had occupied the place. We too identified the place under the banyan tree. We laid our carpet there. We took out our snacks and other edibles which we had brought with us. First, we enjoyed a light refreshment. We had also brought camera with us. We took snaps in different poses. We listened to music. We danced and played also. But meanwhile the moment of enjoyment was interrupted by the loud cries of the people. We rushed to the cries and we were shocked to see that a small boy was drowning in the canal. He was crying for help.

One of my friends is well versed in the art of swimming. He immediately jumped into the canal. After a great struggle, he dragged him out of the canal. He was in a very critical condition. He was rushed to the hospital. With immediate care, his life could be saved. We postponed the whole programme in the midway and accompanied the sick boy. But we were pleased to see him regaining consciousness. The saving of one life was a source of tremendous pleasure.

Thus, it was a day of mixed pleasure. Not only a life was secured due to our timely help and assistance but it marked an important day in my career. The memory of this day is as fresh in my mind as if it has happened today.

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You Might Be a Late Bloomer

The life secrets of those who flailed early but succeeded by old age

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P aul Cézanne always knew he wanted to be an artist. His father compelled him to enter law school, but after two desultory years he withdrew. In 1861, at the age of 22, he went to Paris to pursue his artistic dreams but was rejected by the École des Beaux-Arts, struggled as a painter, and retreated back to his hometown in the south of France, where he worked as a clerk in his father’s bank.

He returned to Paris the next year and was turned down again by the École. His paintings were rejected by the Salon de Paris every year from 1864 to 1869. He continued to submit paintings until 1882, but none were accepted. He joined with the Impressionists, many of whose works were also being rejected, but soon stopped showing with them as well.

By middle age, he was discouraged. He wrote to a friend, “On this matter I must tell you that the numerous studies to which I devoted myself having produced only negative results, and dreading criticism that is only too justified, I have resolved to work in silence, until the day when I should feel capable of defending theoretically the results of my endeavors.” No Cézanne paintings were put on public display when he was between 46 and 56, the prime years for many artists, including some of Cézanne’s most prominent contemporaries.

In 1886, when Cézanne was 47, the celebrated writer Émile Zola, the artist’s closest friend since adolescence, published a novel called The Oeuvre . It was about two young men, one who grows up to be a famous author and the other who grows up to be a failed painter and commits suicide. The painter character was based, at least in part, on Cézanne. (“I had grown up almost in the same cradle as my friend, my brother, Paul Cézanne,” Zola would later write in a French newspaper, “in whom one begins to realize only today the touches of genius of a great painter come to nothing.”) Upon publication of the novel, Zola sent a copy to Cézanne, who responded with a short, polite reply. After that, they rarely communicated.

Things began to turn around in 1895, when, at the age of 56, Cézanne had his first one-man show. Two years later, one of his paintings was purchased by a museum in Berlin, the first time any museum had shown that kind of interest in his work. By the time he was 60, his paintings had started selling, though for much lower prices than those fetched by Manet or Renoir. Soon he was famous, revered. Fellow artists made pilgrimages to watch him work.

What drove the man through all those decades of setbacks and obscurity? One biographer attributed it to his “ inquiétude ”—his drive, restlessness, anxiety. He just kept pushing himself to get better.

His continual sense of dissatisfaction was evident in a letter he wrote to his son in 1906, at age 67, a month before he died: “I want to tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clairvoyant to nature, but that it is always very difficult for me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses. I do not possess that wonderful richness of color that animates nature.” He was still at it on the day he died, still working on his paintings, still teaching himself to improve.

The year after his death, a retrospective of his work was mounted in Paris. Before long, he would be widely recognized as one of the founders of modern art: “Cézanne is the father of us all,” both Matisse and Picasso are said to have declared.

T oday we live in a society structured to promote early bloomers. Our school system has sorted people by the time they are 18, using grades and SAT scores. Some of these people zoom to prestigious academic launching pads while others get left behind. Many of our most prominent models of success made it big while young—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan. Magazines publish lists with headlines like “30 Under 30” to glamorize youthful superstars on the rise. Age discrimination is a fact of life. In California in 2010, for example, more people filed claims with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing for age discrimination than for racial discrimination or sexual harassment. “Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg once said, in possibly the dumbest statement in American history. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, in what might be the next dumbest.

But for many people, the talents that bloom later in life are more consequential than the ones that bloom early. A 2019 study by researchers in Denmark found that, on average, Nobel Prize winners made their crucial discoveries at the age of 44 . Even brilliant people apparently need at least a couple of decades to master their field.

The average age of a U.S. patent applicant is 47. A 45-year-old is twice as likely to produce a scientific breakthrough as a 25-year-old . A study published in The American Economic Review found 45 to be the average age of an entrepreneur–and found furthermore that the likelihood that an entrepreneur’s start-up will succeed increases significantly between ages 25 and 35, with the odds of success continuing to rise well into the 50s. A tech founder who is 50 is twice as likely to start a successful company as one who is 30 . A study by researchers at Northwestern University, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau found that the fastest-growing start-ups were founded by people whose average age was 45 when their company was launched . The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation produced a study that found that the peak innovation age is the late 40s .

Successful late bloomers are all around us. Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s. Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s. Isak Dinesen published the book that established her literary reputation, Out of Africa , at 52. Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s leading chipmaker, at 55. If Samuel Johnson had died at 40, few would remember him, but now he is considered one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language. Copernicus came up with his theory of planetary motion in his 60s. Grandma Moses started painting at 77. Noah was around 600 when he built his ark (though Noah truthers dispute his birth certificate).

Why do some people hit their peak later than others? In his book Late Bloomers , the journalist Rich Karlgaard points out that this is really two questions: First, why didn’t these people bloom earlier? Second, what traits or skills did they possess that enabled them to bloom late? It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system. They usually have to invent their own paths. Late bloomers “fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,” Karlgaard writes, “surprising even those closest to them.”

Jim VandeHei: What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago

If you survey history, a taxonomy of achievement emerges. In the first category are the early bloomers, the precocious geniuses. These are people like Picasso or Fitzgerald who succeeded young. As the University of Chicago economist David Galenson has pointed out, these high achievers usually made a conceptual breakthrough. They came up with a new idea and then executed it. Picasso had a clear idea of Cubism, and how he was going to revolutionize art, in his mid-20s. Then he went out and painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon .

Then there are the “ second-mountain people ,” exemplified by, say, Albert Schweitzer. First, they conquer their career mountain; Schweitzer, for instance, was an accomplished musician and scholar. But these people find their career success unsatisfying, so they leave their career mountain to serve humanity—their whole motivational structure shifts from acquisition to altruism. Schweitzer became a doctor in the poorest parts of Africa, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 1952.

Finally, there are the people Galenson calls “the masters.” In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses , he writes about people like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young. This could have been discouraging, but they just kept improving.

These people don’t do as much advance planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments. They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more. Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly. Their focus is on the process of learning itself: Am I closer to understanding, to mastering? They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life. They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans.

L et’s look at some of the traits that tend to distinguish late bloomers from early bloomers—the qualities that cause them to lag early in life but surge ahead over the long haul.

Intrinsic motivation. Most of our schools and workplaces are built around extrinsic motivation: If you work hard, you will be rewarded with good grades, better salaries, and performance bonuses. Extrinsic-motivation systems are built on the assumption that although work is unpleasant, if you give people external incentives to perform, they will respond productively.

People who submit to these extrinsic-reward systems are encouraged to develop a merit-badge mentality. They get good at complying with other people’s standards, following other people’s methods, and pursuing other people’s goals. The people who thrive in these sorts of systems are good at earning high GPAs—having the self-discipline to get A’s in all subjects, even the ones that don’t interest them. They are valuable to companies precisely because they’re good at competently completing whatever tasks are put in front of them.

People driven by intrinsic motivation are not like that. They are bad at paying attention to what other people tell them to pay attention to. Winston Churchill was a poor student for just this reason. “Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Early Life .

But such people can be great at paying attention to things that do interest them. The intrinsically motivated have a strong need for autonomy. They are driven by their own curiosity, their own obsessions—and the power of this motivation eclipses the lesser ones fired by extrinsic rewards.

Extrinsically motivated people tend to race ahead during young adulthood, when the job is to please teachers, bosses, and other older people, but then stop working as hard once that goal is met. They’re likely to take short cuts if it can get them more quickly to the goal.

Worse, as research by scholars like the psychologist Edward L. Deci has established, if you reward people extrinsically, you can end up crushing the person’s capacity for intrinsic motivation . If you pay kids to read, they might read more in the short term—but over time they’ll regard reading as unpleasant work, best avoided. A 2009 London School of Economics study that looked at 51 corporate pay-for-performance plans found that financial incentives “can have a negative impact on overall performance.”

I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years. A long, awkward silence followed. Finally a student said, “You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through class.” These students were hurrying to be good enough to get their merit badges, but not getting deep enough into any subject to be transformed. They didn’t love the process of learning itself, which is what you need if you’re going to keep educating yourself decade after decade—which, in turn, is what you need to keep advancing when the world isn’t rewarding you with impressive grades and prizes.

Intrinsically motivated people, by contrast, are self-directed and often obsessed, burying themselves deep into some subject or task. They find learning about a subject or doing an activity to be their own reward, so they are less likely to cut corners. As Vincent van Gogh—a kind of early late bloomer, who struggled to find his way and didn’t create most of his signature works until the last two years of his life before dying at 37—wrote to his brother, “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”

In Drive , the writer Daniel Pink argues that extrinsic-motivation models work fine when tasks are routine, boring, and technical. But he cites a vast body of research showing that intrinsically motivated people are more productive, more persistent, and less likely to burn out. They also exhibit higher levels of well-being. Over the long run, Pink concludes, “intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.”

Early screw-ups. Late bloomers often don’t fit into existing systems. To use William Deresiewicz’s term, they are bad at being “excellent sheep” —bad at following the conventional rules of success. Or to put it another way, they can be assholes. Buckminster Fuller was expelled from college twice, lost his job in the building business when he was 32, and later contemplated suicide so his family could live off his life insurance. But then he moved to Greenwich Village, took a teaching job at Black Mountain College, and eventually emerged as an architect, designer, futurist, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Colonel Sanders was fired for insubordination when he was a railway engineer, and then fired again for brawling with a colleague while working as a fireman. His career as a lawyer ended when he got into a fistfight with a client, and he lost his job as an insurance salesman because he was unsuited to working for other people. Then, at 62, he created the recipe for what became Kentucky Fried Chicken, began to succeed as a franchiser at 69, and sold the company for $2 million when he was 73.

Late bloomers often have an edge to them, a willingness to battle with authority.

“ Diversive curiosity .” Our culture pushes people to specialize early: Be like Tiger Woods driving golf balls as a toddler. Concentrate on one thing and get really good, really fast—whether it is golf or physics or investing. In the academic world, specialization is rewarded: Don’t be a scholar of Europe, be a scholar of Dutch basket weaving in the 16th century.

Yet when the journalist David Epstein looked at the lives of professional athletes, he found that most of them were less like Tiger Woods and more like Roger Federer, who played a lot of different sports when he was young. These athletes went through what researchers call a “sampling period” and only narrowed their focus to one sport later on. In his book Range , Epstein writes that people who went through a sampling period ended up enjoying greater success over the long run: “One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earning lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fitted their skills and personalities.”

Jessica Lahey and Tim Lahey: How middle-school failures lead to medical-school success

Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period, as they cast about for a vocation. Julia Child made hats, worked for U.S. intelligence (where she was part of a team trying to develop an effective shark repellent), and thought about trying to become a novelist before enrolling in a French cooking school at 37. Van Gogh was an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, and a street preacher before taking up painting at 27. During those wandering years, he was a miserable failure. His family watched his repeated downward spirals with embarrassment.

During these early periods, late bloomers try and then quit so many jobs that the people around them might conclude that they lack resilience. But these are exactly the years when the late bloomers are developing what psychologists call “diversive curiosity” —the ability to wander into a broad range of interests in a manner that seems to have no rhyme or reason.

The benefits of this kind of curiosity might be hard to see in the short term, but they become obvious once the late bloomer begins to take advantage of their breadth of knowledge by putting discordant ideas together in new ways. When the psychologist Howard Gruber studied the diaries of Charles Darwin , he found that in the decades before he published On the Origin of Species , Darwin was “pen pals” (as David Epstein puts it) with at least 231 scientists, whose worked ranged across 13 broad streams, from economics to geology, the biology of barnacles to the sex life of birds. Darwin couldn’t have written his great masterworks if he hadn’t been able to combine these vastly different intellectual currents.

Epstein notes that many of the most successful scientists have had diverse interests, and especially in different kinds of performing: Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to spend large chunks of time as an amateur actor, musician, magician, or other type of performer than non-Nobel-winning scientists are. Epstein quotes Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience: “To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies,” Cajal wrote, speaking of these late-blooming Nobelists, “while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”

Late bloomers tend to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and can bring multiple ways of thinking to bear on a single complex problem. They also have a high tolerance for inefficiency. They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore. In old age, the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “The amateur spirit has guided my thinking and writing.” He had wandered from subject to subject throughout his life, playing around.

The ability to self-teach. Late bloomers don’t find their calling until they are too old for traditional education systems. So they have to teach themselves. Successful autodidacts start with what psychologists call a “high need for cognition”—in other words, they like to think a lot. In his book Curious , Ian Leslie presents a series of statements that, when answered in the affirmative, indicate a high need for cognition: “I would prefer complex to simple problems”; “I prefer my life be filled with puzzles that I can’t solve”; “I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours.”

Leonardo da Vinci is the poster child for high-cognition needs. Consider his famous lists of self-assigned research projects : “Ask the master of arithmetic how to square a triangle … examine a crossbow … ask about the measurement of the sun … draw Milan.” Benjamin Franklin was similar. After he was appointed U.S. ambassador to France, he could have relaxed on his transatlantic voyages between home and work. Instead, he turned them into scientific expeditions, measuring the temperature of the water as he went, which allowed him to discover and chart the Gulf Stream.

Successful late bloomers combine this high need for cognition with a seemingly contradictory trait: epistemic humility. They are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know.

This mentality combines high self-belief ( I can figure this out on my own; I know my standards are right and the world’s standards are wrong ) with high self-doubt ( There’s a lot I don’t know, and I am falling short in many ways ).

The combination of a high need for cognition and epistemic humility is a recipe for lifelong learning. Late bloomers learn more slowly but also more deeply precisely because they’re exploring on their own. The benefits of acquiring this self-taught knowledge compound over time. The more you know about a subject, the faster you can learn. A chess grandmaster with thousands of past matches stored in their head will see a new strategy much faster than a chess beginner. Knowledge begets knowledge. Researchers call this “the Matthew effect” : “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.” Pretty soon, the late bloomer is taking off.

The ability to finally commit. Of course, late bloomers can’t just wander forever. At some point they must grab onto some challenge that engages their powerful intrinsic drive. They have to commit. Ray Kroc endured a classic wandering period. He got a job selling ribbons. He played piano in a bordello. He read the ticker tape at the Chicago stock exchange. He sold paper cups and then milkshake mixers. In that latter job he noticed that one restaurant was ordering a tremendous number of milkshake machines. Curious, he drove halfway across the country to see it, and found a fast-food restaurant that was more efficiently churning out meals than any he had ever encountered. “There was something almost religious about Kroc’s inspirational moment when he discovered McDonald’s,” Henry Oliver writes in his forthcoming book, Second Act . Kroc just cared about hamburgers and fries (and milkshakes) more than most people. He bought the restaurant, and brought to it his own form of genius, which was the ability to franchise it on a massive scale.

The mind of the explorer. By middle age, many late bloomers have achieved lift-off and are getting to enjoy the pleasures of concentrated effort. They are absorbed, fascinated. But since they are freer from ties and associations than the early achiever, late bloomers can also change their mind and update their models without worrying about betraying any professional norms.

We have a notion that the happiest people are those who have aimed their life toward some goal and then attained it, like winning a championship trophy or achieving renown. But the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. “Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once told the poet Donald Hall . “And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Crankiness in old age. So far, I’ve been describing late bloomers as if they were all openhearted curiosity and wonder. But remember that many of them have been butting against established institutions their whole lives—and they’ve naturally developed oppositional, chip-on-the-shoulder, even angry mindsets.

In his essay “ The Artist Grows Old ,” the great art critic Sir Kenneth Clark wrote about painters—like Titian, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Cézanne—who produced their best work at the end of their lives, sometimes in their 80s or even 90s. He noticed that while these older artists painted with passion, this passion was inflected with what he called “transcendental pessimism.” The artists who peak late, he found, “take a very poor view of human life.” They are energized by a holy rage. The British artist William Turner felt so hopeless late in life that he barely spoke. “Old artists are solitary,” Clark writes. “Like all old people they are bored and irritated by the company of their fellow bipeds and yet find their isolation depressing. They are also suspicious of interference.”

The angry old artists fight back with their brushes. They retreat from realism. Their handling of paint grows freer. “Cézanne, who in middle life painted with the delicacy of a watercolorist, and was almost afraid, as he said, to sully the whiteness of a canvas, ended by attacking it with heavy and passionate strokes,” Clark writes. “The increased vitality of an aged hand is hard to explain.”

Younger painters, like younger workers in any field, are trying to learn the language of the craft. Older painters, like older expert practitioners in other fields, have mastered the language and are willing to bend it. Older painters feel free to jettison the rules that stifle their prophetic voice. They can express what they need to more purely.

Clark’s analysis is insightful, but I think he may be overgeneralizing. His theory applies to an angry, pessimistic painting like Michelangelo’s late work The Crucifixion of St. Peter , a painting of an old man raging against the inhumanity of the world . But Clark’s theory doesn’t really apply to, say, Rembrandt’s late work The Return of the Prodigal Son . By the time he painted it, Rembrandt was old, broke, and out of fashion; his wife and many of his children had preceded him to the grave. But Prodigal Son is infused with a spirit of holy forgiveness. It shows a father offering infinite love to a wayward, emaciated, and grateful son. It couldn’t be gentler.

Wisdom. After a lifetime of experimentation, some late bloomers transcend their craft or career and achieve a kind of comprehensive wisdom.

Wisdom is a complicated trait. It starts with pattern recognition—using experience to understand what is really going on. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg provides a classic expression of this ability in his book The Wisdom Paradox . “Frequently when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary,” he writes. “The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

But the trait we call wisdom is more than just pattern recognition; it’s the ability to see things from multiple points of view, the ability to aggregate perspectives and rest in the tensions between them. When he was in his 60s, Cézanne built a study in Provence and painted a series of paintings of a single mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire , which are now often considered his greatest works. He painted the mountain at different times of day, in different sorts of light. He wasn’t so much painting the mountain as painting time. He was also painting perception itself, its continual flow, its uncertainties and evolutions. “I progress very slowly,” he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard, “for nature reveals herself to me in complex ways; and the progress needed is endless.”

“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker. “Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.” For some late bloomers, the exploration never ends. They have a certain distinct way of being in the world, but they express that way of being at greater and greater levels of complexity as they age.

Wisdom is an intellectual trait—the ability to see reality as it really is. But it is also a moral trait; we wouldn’t call a self-centered person wise. It is also a spiritual trait; the wise person possesses a certain tranquility, the ability to stay calm when others are overwhelmed with negative emotions.

Arthur C. Brooks: How to succeed at failure

When I was young I was mentored by William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, both at that time approaching the end of their careers. Both men had changed history. Buckley created the modern conservative movement that led to the election of Ronald Reagan. Friedman changed economics and won the Nobel Prize. I had a chance to ask each of them, separately, if they ever felt completion, if they ever had a sense that they’d done their work and now they had crossed the finish line and could relax. Neither man even understood my question. They were never at rest, pushing for what they saw as a better society all the days of their lives.

My friend Tim Keller, the late pastor, was in some ways not a classic late bloomer—his talents were already evident when he was a young man. But those talents weren’t afforded much public scope at the church in rural Virginia where his calling had taken him.

Tim didn’t feel qualified to publish his first major book until he was 58. Over the next 10 years he published nearly three dozen more, harvesting the wisdom he’d been gathering all along. His books have sold more than 25 million copies. During this same time, he founded Redeemer, the most influential church in New York and maybe America.

When Tim got pancreatic cancer at the age of 70, he was still in the prime of his late-blooming life. Under the shadow of death, as he wrote in The Atlanti c , his spiritual awareness grew deeper. He experienced more sadness and also more joy. But what I will always remember about those final years is how much more eager Tim was to talk about the state of the world than about the state of his own health. He had more to give, and he worked feverishly until the end. He left behind an agenda for how to repair the American church —a specific action plan for how to mend the Christian presence in our torn land.

I’ve noticed this pattern again and again: Slow at the start, late bloomers are still sprinting during that final lap—they do not slow down as age brings its decay. They are seeking. They are striving. They are in it with all their heart.

Fiona, age three, with her adoptive grandparents. All images supplied by and © the author

The adoption paradox

Even happy families cannot avoid the reality – my reality – that adoption is predicated on transacting the life of a child.

by Fiona Sampson   + BIO

A child of four or five sits colouring at a low table. Memory can be tricky: the image is dim and rather unstable. But I know that the child is me, and that she’s been caught showing off by her grandmother, who is looking after her. (Where are the parents? I don’t know.)

‘I’m going to show my mummy and daddy,’ says the little girl, about her picture.

‘They’re not your mummy and daddy,’ says the old woman on the sofa, witchily. ‘You have a real mummy and daddy somewhere else.’

The child I remember doesn’t show her face; she keeps on colouring. But words have magic powers. Real… somewhere else. This single sentence sucks the reality out of everything around her: the red carpet, the blue Formica tabletop, the buttoned upholstery of the sofa on which her grandmother sits watching her.

The author, aged two and a half

You could call it a life sentence , for this is the moment in which I learn that I am adopted.

I will repress this memory for decades, and for all the usual reasons. Like every child, I want to be happy. Still, what makes adoption so through-the-mirror, so literally unheimlich, so ‘un-homing’, has nothing to do with unhappy families or childhood abuse. Indeed, I suspect the reason that comparatively few stories of adoptee experience make it to the mainstream is that this is not classic misery memoir territory. Instead, at its heart are existential questions of identity, about the foundations of the self.

C hildren who are adopted must ask themselves ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What does it mean to be me?’: generally when they’re still too young to manage this kind of world-shifting thought experiment. And they can never put the experiment aside. This shifty, shifting interplay of alternative narratives is who they are.

Perhaps inevitably, my grandmother’s revelation is followed by a scene in the bathroom – maybe that evening, maybe days later – when my child self, having listened to my mother tell some apparently irrelevant story about how babies grow in tummies, insists in tears: ‘But I am still really your little girl, aren’t I?’ Searching around, as I will for years to come, for some kind of inalienability. This I do remember: the bathroom mirror, the cold light.

But of course, there is no inalienability anywhere in the adoption triangle. Adoption is precisely predicated upon alienability. Within it, everything – name, home, belonging, life chances – can be negotiated. Which means everything can also be negotiated away. Adoption goes deeper even than those inalienable – intrinsic – rights that we hold to be part of, and help us to define, the human individual: self-determination, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and so on. Adoption says that not even the individual’s identity is intrinsic. Not even, to put it another way, their individuality itself.

‘Normal’ family life – kids growing up in birth families of whatever form – is scarily circumstantial

For the child, this total alienability means there’s nothing intrinsic to herself that guarantees her connection to anyone. What has been chosen can be unchosen. The existential lack of givenness with which adoptees live is why, for us, adoptive ‘parents’ who return ‘their’ kids to the system when the going gets tough are more than stories about abuse, they have a kind of abysmal horror. We don’t just read them with sympathy, they ‘take us apart’.

Still, some biological parents do abandon their kids, or are forced to hand them over to authorities of various kinds, or prevented by destitution or illness from being able to raise them. Some die. Their babies get kidnapped by regimes, ‘charities’, people smugglers. Viewed this way, ‘normal’ family life – kids growing up in birth families of whatever form: step-, half-, single-parent, gay, IVF, grandparental – is scarily circumstantial. Plus, even within bio families, no one reposes entirely within the bosom of inalienability. Divorces lead to custody battles; adult siblings drift apart; parents offer addict offspring tough love.

But we don’t really want to think about this. It’s already difficult enough working out who you are, paying the bills, and just generally hustling a living. Having something to count on through thick and thin – a touchstone of something absolute, perhaps, even within the most secular of lives – is as attractive as ever. The political rhetoric of ‘hardworking families’ – invoked by all major political parties around the world – reaches across the ideological spectrum. Though it’s the Right, of course, that crosses its fingers hardest against those it sees as lacking the social status of a nuclear family, with habitual targets including single mothers and the LGBTQ+ community.

A doptees lack that social status too. Which leads me to ask again why, that summer afternoon in our house on a suburban street in south-west England, my grandmother chose to poke at the story of my adoption. From family diaries I’ve inherited, I know how much she had been against the idea in the first place. Still, in those days before IVF, there was no other ‘solution’ to childlessness. Every week of my childhood we prayed in church for ‘the barren woman’, and as I got older and understood what this meant, I became embarrassed for my mum. But perhaps my grandmother, if not consciously, blamed my father instead. I began to notice how neither of my adoptive parents got on well with their in-laws. My father’s side thought my mother nervy and pretentious, while my mother’s family found my father, son of a country vicar, too down to earth. ‘The rectory kitchen had an earth floor ,’ my mother hissed once in explanation.

The author, age five, in the garden of her grandfather’s house

Where was I in this? Since I was problematic, I think each side identified me with the ‘other’. Until puberty, I was a daddy’s girl; certainly, at four or five, I was already bookish like him. Family memory has my (dyslexic) mother tearing a newspaper out of my hands when I’m two years old.

Perhaps my grandmother thought of the pair of us as a kind of trouble her daughter had got into. Or perhaps she was indulging in magical thinking. The lurking alienability of the closest human bonds is frightening, after all. And adoption, being founded upon this risk, reminds society about it at the same time as denying it, through pretending that its own remedial process is a problem-busting happy ending.

In truth, it can only ever be a happi er ending. Of course, every kid who escapes institutional care to grow up in a loving adoptive family has a happier ending – and middle, and almost-beginning – than would otherwise be the case. And even though it’s undoubtedly harder to love someone else’s biological child than your own – why else would stepmothers have such a wicked reputation in folk wisdom? – there are innumerable such families, such kids. But to say this is as good as family bonds that never fractured in the first place is to confuse the contingent with an absolute good. Like claiming that fantastic orthopaedic surgery after a major accident is as good as never having had the accident in the first place.

The social pressure to be grateful prevents the sheer effort of being an adoptee from being talked about

The new adoptive family, forming like a scar, is built on loss and breakage. It has to try and heal each corner of its triad: biological parents who have lost (or chosen to lose) their kids, adoptive parents who are often dealing with infertility and the loss of the dream of ‘kids of their own’, and an adoptee who will grow up without the restful privilege of a family that is ‘their own’.

Over the years, I’ve come to think that my grandmother was also poking me. My childish psyche, tentacled like a sea anemone, would shut if she hurt it enough. It did shut. And she was compelled to make it do so because I was a stranger in the family. The cuckoo in the nest , a phrase I got to know well. Both a stranger: and so anomalously strange that I would eventually pass more and better exams than any of her four biological grandchildren.

An official photo sent by the (then) prospective adopters back to the agency within three days of the child’s arrival. Note the shaved head

Still, I had to strive to do so and, as that striving suggests, in my experience living in adoption means living with anxiety. I believe the social pressure on us to be grateful prevents the sheer effort of being an adoptee from being talked about. There’s a lot of negative expectation, talk of bad blood , around what’s going to emerge from the default cuteness of being a child. Not that I was a cute kid. My adoptive mother’s strategy was to keep me always slightly undernourished and overstretched, continually slightly unwell, in order to underline her charity in taking on a child whose background could be assumed to be, at best, what she called ‘common’.

But many adoptees I’ve known are, or were, cute. They strove as hard to sparkle as I did to be good: obedient and hardworking, I was desperate to please. Every attempt to be loveable is an attempt to be seductive. I have a theory, based only on personal experience of what happened to several of my contemporaries, that adopted kids are extra vulnerable to grooming. Cases that made the national news, scandals known only to classmates: perhaps I was lucky to be kept plain and awkward. I can’t forget the ones who dropped out, who killed themselves.

So much innocent striving. It came from being a source of anxiety in our adoptive families. Would the taint show in some way? Would we be naughty, or dishonest, or – particularly for girls when I was growing up – promiscuous? The reverse too: what unexpected talents, skills, strengths might emerge from our profound unknown-ness as an unrelated child? As I grew through childhood, for example, I took to books like a duck to water. But I was also inevitably clumsier than the adults I lived with. This natural developmental stage became parsed as an attribute – poor coordination – into which I accordingly grew: children are very amenable. I suspect adoptive children take on particular family roles even more than other kids: the good one, the bad one, the brainy stupid sporty pretty blond dark funny one… The result in my case was to make all of us in that house feel I was like an unexploded bomb. The cut glass on the sideboard, the best china stacked within it, seemed to shudder as I passed, and I shuddered too. I was afraid that, even without touching, I would somehow knock or chip or crack something.

B eing an adoptee is performative. Some words for this are: being good enough, assimilating, fighting for acceptance, not being but being- as . For me it meant, among other things, never being allowed to go out of the house with teenaged friends. Adoption is arduous for everyone, even when it works. So I find the social media trend for videos of adopters and adoptees meeting for the first time incomprehensible. It’s not just that it’s voyeuristic: it’s that those posting and viewing them seem unable to see what’s there in plain sight.

Today, many domestic adoptions, in the UK at least, are open. The child they’re built around knows where she came from. The adoptive family may even stay in touch with her birth family during her childhood. But when I was a baby, most adoptions were not only retroactively ‘closed’ but conducted ‘blind’, with no choosing each other. Indeed, no meeting at all prior to the child being handed over for life. This was understood not to matter because the child was seen as completely interchangeable – apart, perhaps, from its sex. The baby as tabula rasa for the adopters to ‘make their own’. Will this idea return, as more accidental babies come up for adoption following the striking down of Roe v Wade in the United States, and a more general shift in the Global North away from prioritising women’s rights?

Whatever happens next, international adoption – where allowed – continues to be ‘blind’. And at the end of all the fees and paperwork, two or three unrelated people, small and big, meet each other. Videos that parade this meeting are usually labelled #happymoment: which I imagine is in the nature of a Users’ Guide, because they quite plainly are not. They make everything that’s difficult about adoption visible, starting with the control exercised by the adoption agency. A stunned, often weeping child is led, like the bride in a forced marriage, into the presence of strangers with whom the child must spend the rest of her life. The adoptive parents’ emotions are visible too: this is the apotheosis of years of longing. (If they’re disappointed, they certainly can’t show it now.) This small person must now sustain their big longing. The new parents generally offer some small cheap toy to draw her forward into the ambush of an embrace . (Don’t take treats from strangers, kids!) And the tackiness of these greeting gifts seems to sum up the contingency of adoption, its underlying Oh, this will do ethos.

It was less than a week before Christmas. If I wasn’t placed before the holiday, I was to be put into an institution

I wasn’t adopted as an ambulatory child, thank goodness, but after a few months of being passed between foster mothers. Nevertheless, I know quite a lot about my own #happymoment. (I almost prefer the crudeness of the alternative, #gotchaday – also, of course, used for pets and rescue animals – with its implied compulsion.) From my biological mother, whom I traced years ago, I know how an agency worker took me from her, carried me through a nearby door – and that my adoptive parents were right on the other side. She heard my adoptive mother laugh – a laugh I know intimately of course. I know too that in the long taxi journey across London to the agency in Fitzrovia, my bio mother apologised to me and had a little cry.

I know the bleached London brick of those windy Fitzrovia terraces.

I know from my adoptive dad’s diary that we nearly didn’t turn up. We arrived for the handover 50 minutes late, leaving my new parents just 10 minutes to interact with me at the agency before they took me away. Checks, balances?

I don’t know how much I was priced at, but I do know that my grandmother told my mother they could have paid more and got a younger baby. I know from my case file that it was less than a week before Christmas and that, if I wasn’t placed before the holiday, I was to be put into an institution. My file also tells me I was hard to place because I was a girl. And also because someone has noted on the file that my biological mother is plain and I resemble her.

I know from my adoptive mother that, less than an hour later, I was throwing up on her on the train, and so my dad asked people in the compartment to stop smoking. Since she was widowed, she’s kept returning to this story. It’s as if, like her own mother, she associates me with my father. In the same vein, it’s she who recently brought back my memory of the primal scene with her mother. I had remembered the terror of ‘But I am still really your little girl, aren’t I?’ but forgotten its cause. The search for reassurance was a screen memory; behind it was the abyss of disconnection.

T here are a hundred ways to tell a child she’s adopted: adoption is not culture specific. There have always been orphans and foundlings, and people wishing to take them into their families. Sources as varied as the 6th- to 5th-century BCE story of Moses, or the accounts of apprentice-adoptions of gifted child artists in Giorgio Vasari’s 16th-century Lives of the Artists , tell us this. Yet adoption is laden with cultural meanings, and not, usually, by adoptees themselves. How strange it is, for example, that even with our era’s embrace of essential identities – through identity politics, in gender transitioning – adoption remains an exception, held to define an individual regardless of their own experience and understanding of themselves.

Even the happiest of families cannot completely resolve the difficulty that adoption is necessarily about de-essentialisation, a destabilising of identity, which almost compels some kind of remedial stabilisation. Adoptee views and experiences of this central ‘knot’ vary hugely. For some, their adoptive identity and the life they lead with it is ‘real’ and the rest almost fabular. For others, nature trumps nurture. Still others feel that a range of inherited and learnt characteristics coexist within them. But whatever their personal take on identity, their legal standing will not flex with it. An adoptee may wish to acknowledge their birth identity, but legal processes such as citizenship accept only documentation, not DNA testing, as evidence of identity. Or they may wish to deny that part of their identity altogether, and fix themselves more fully in their adoptive family. Just as gender transitioning is understood to cancel out someone’s first-given identity, so the neither-nor of adoptive identity can feel like a lie that needs cancelling out. Yet this too is unachievable. There is no legal form that can further undo the residue of biological embodiment at the heart of the adoption experience. And no adoptee can transition to biological belonging: familial relatedness would require a total genetic rewrite.

Consciousness of adoption is surely the original impostor syndrome

However happy an adoption, birth identity remains. It is Thomas Hardy’s ‘Heredity’, ‘the family face’ that will ‘live on, /Projecting trait and trace/ … And leaping from place to place’ in the poem the British writer published in 1917. Or else it’s a question in medical histories. Or it’s something that rises to the surface, an old scar now, at such moments of family pressure as marriage or inheritance.

Whatever an adoptee’s beliefs, in other words, a duality, a kind of astigmatism of the self, remains part of their experience. Perhaps it helps to see this a little aslant. In the canonical French novelist George Sand’s memoir Histoire de ma Vie (1855), she addresses having been (mis-)informed that she was ‘really’ an earlier, older child than herself, who had been born to her parents before they married and was therefore omitted from the records:

It’s no more than two or three years that I’ve known positively who I am. I was indeed born [as registered]; I am truly – myself – in a word, which doesn’t stop pleasing me, for there’s something troubling about doubting one’s name, one’s age and one’s country … I could have died without knowing whether I had lived – in person – or in someone else’s place. [Author’s translation]

‘In someone else’s place’: consciousness of adoption is surely the original impostor syndrome. To which someone who hasn’t experienced it might respond: ‘But never mind what you’re called : core identity is being the one who experiences and does what you do.’ Well then: but what if this duality, this slippage between two stories about yourself, forms part of that experience? Your identity must then contain that plurality. Like the dragon eating its tail on a Romanesque capital, identity as awareness gives ceaselessly onto awareness of identity.

Adoption is a kind of forcing ground of these forms of identity experiment. I suspect that the more widely it is recognised as such, the more adoptees will find the cultural space to be respected simply as ordinary people who have lived through particular early circumstances. Circumstances that don’t trouble most people, but that throw up problems and fears – about who we are, how we love and where we are safe – in which we all share.

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Interim President Michael I. Kotlikoff

From ‘scholarship kid’ to president, Kotlikoff meets the moment

By david nutt, cornell chronicle.

In the fall of 1999, Mike Kotlikoff was on a nine-seat commuter plane bound for Philadelphia, feeling queasy. He was returning from a visit to Cornell, where he was being recruited to build a new department in biomedical sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine and lead a new, universitywide initiative in mammalian genomics.

“It was all quite seductive,” Kotlikoff said. “I felt a bit nauseous on the plane going home because I knew coming to Cornell meant disrupting my family and leaving colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania.”

At Cornell, Kotlikoff rose steadily in leadership positions: from founding chair of biomedical sciences in 2000, to dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine in 2007, to university provost in 2015.

Almost 25 years after that first visit, Kotlikoff is now looking ahead to another career transition. On July 1, he assumes the role of Cornell’s interim president following the retirement of Cornell’s 14th president, Martha E. Pollack. He will serve until 2026.

This change comes at a challenging time – for Kotlikoff and for Cornell.

“Political stress and contention is certain to continue,” he said, citing the presidential election, campus activism, global conflicts and criticism of higher education. “But I am confident that Cornellians will meet that moment, through civil, candid and productive discussions about what we do best as a university: what we are, and what we’re not.”

‘Forever grateful’

Kotlikoff grew up in Pennsauken, New Jersey, just outside of Camden, where his father and two uncles ran a clothing business. Kotlikoff’s parents were not well-to-do, but they saved to send their three children to private Quaker schools, which instilled in Kotlikoff an appreciation for the importance of listening to others and building consensus. At the time, his mother was working as a secretary at the University of Pennsylvania, which meant free tuition for her children.

Kotlikoff meets with student athletes and athletics staff in the Friedman Strength and Conditioning Center in Bartels Hall.

“My brother, my sister and I were staff scholarship kids,” Kotlikoff said. “It is something for which I’m forever grateful.”

Kotlikoff paid his college expenses with part-time jobs: handing out shoes and jockstraps to the football team and working nights at the local steak shop on Spruce Street. During the summers, he worked construction, a “fun” departure from studying comparative literature.

Kotlikoff was an eclectic reader, with a particular fondness for Russian and German literature. His interest in writing led to his being one of eight students in a course taught by novelist Philip Roth.

“We’d meet once a week on Thursdays,” Kotlikoff said. “Roth was sarcastic, hilarious, biting. He tore your stuff apart. But then when he praised your work, it was thrilling. I remember going to him for advice afterwards about next career steps, and he was very gracious.”

After receiving his B.A. in literature in 1973, Kotlikoff wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He spent his first years after graduation working on a factory assembly line in Munich, Germany, to earn enough money to spend several months traveling through France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland.

Back in the United States, he found a job that reflected his growing interest in science and medicine: putting horses on the surgical table and recovering them after surgery at New Bolton Center, the large animal hospital at Penn’s veterinary college.

Kotlikoff, then acting president, at Commencement in 2016.

“Veterinary medicine seemed broader than human medicine,” he said, “with unlimited potential.”

There was only one problem: His literature degree provided few of the course prerequisites he’d need for veterinary school. So Kotlikoff worked his way through the requirements while continuing his vet school job.

By 1979, he was back at Penn as a student of veterinary medicine. He realized he was most interested in biomedical research.

“I met my wife in vet school, and she was becoming a far better vet, with far more patience than I would ever have,” he said. “I realized I could never be that good. Carolyn kind of forced me out of the profession.”

After earning his VMD in 1981 and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis, in 1984, Kotlikoff returned to Penn as an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Biology. Carolyn ran a successful cat practice in nearby Chestnut Hill. They had no reason to think they’d ever leave.

‘Just don’t pick anybody worse’

It was the mice that did it.

By the late 1990s, Kotlikoff’s lab had made substantial advancements in studying ion channel proteins that control muscle excitability, but he was becoming interested in heart development, cardiovascular biology and mouse genetics. His lab had shown that genetically manipulating mouse models to express purpose-designed fluorescent proteins could provide new ways to understand the biology of complex systems and features such as cell signaling by modifying the mouse genome to place these genetically encoded signaling molecules within specific cells.

Kotlikoff meets with (from left): Lola Brown, assistant professor of research education in anesthesiology; Hugh C. Hemmings Jr., the Joseph F. Artusio Jr. Professor and Chair of Anesthesiology; and John P. Leonard, the Richard T. Silver Distinguished Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology, all at Weill Cornell Medicine.

“At the time, no one was working on mouse genetics at Cornell, which had no facilities to recruit scientists using the most powerful mammalian model in biomedicine,” Kotlikoff said. “So, in addition to chairing and building a new department, I saw a tremendous opportunity to have a significant impact on the university.”

At Cornell, Kotlikoff expanded his lab’s portfolio of breakthroughs to include mice with heart cells expressing optogenetic molecules, ways to use cell therapy to treat cardiac arrhythmias and an understanding of how stem cells create new heart cells in baby mice but not adults. Kotlikoff also launched and led the university’s Mammalian Genomics Life Science Initiative and in seven years built CVM’s Department of Biomedical Sciences. When the college dean’s term concluded in 2007, Kotlikoff was asked to replace him.

Reluctant to take time away from his lab, Kotlikoff told the search committee, “If you pick somebody better, I’ll be the happiest person in the room. Just don’t pick anybody worse.”

Within a year, Kotlikoff was stewarding the college through the 2008 global financial crisis. He asked then-Provost Kent Fuchs to create a committee to look at the university’s budget model – and appoint him to it. The committee’s final report provided the university with a roadmap for restabilizing its finances, and Kotlikoff became more interested in – and adept at addressing – universitywide issues.

In 2015, newly arrived president Elizabeth Garrett selected Kotlikoff to serve as university provost. He asked to be named chief budget officer in addition to chief academic officer.

Kotlikoff meets with Ben Sandkam, assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, and Nexus Scholars Program students working with him this summer, in Corson-Mudd Hall.

“People think, ‘Oh, if the provost is in charge of the budget, it’ll just be giving money to colleges and to faculty,’” he said. “But really the provost has to make sure the academic and the administrative parts of the academy are in balance.”

In his nine years as provost, Kotlikoff worked with colleagues on a host of massive projects, including the creation of the SC Johnson College of Business and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy; the Radical Collaboration initiative; and the North Campus Residential Expansion. He also helped guide the university’s COVID-19 response, ensuring that academic operations remained on track and safe.

‘I never planned an administrative career’

Last semester, President Pollack asked Kotlikoff to step into her office, closed the door and told him she had decided to retire.

“And then she told me that Kraig wanted to talk to me in 15 minutes,” he said.

Kraig H. Kayser, MBA ’84, chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees, asked Kotlikoff to serve as interim president. A search for a new provost is already underway; once Cornell’s 15th president is named, Kotlikoff plans to retire.

The new role brings new challenges. His purview will now include Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. He will also be stepping onto a larger stage.

“I’ve been much more operational and focused on academic and administrative initiatives, as well as budgetary challenges,” he said. “The presidential role puts a premium on representing Cornell formally to the community, and to the rest of the world.”

Kotlikoff speaks with student veterans in Veterans House on West Campus.

In a sense, Kotlikoff has been preparing for this role his whole academic career.

“I think I know what makes a great university work and the core principles that underlie that work,” he said. “It helps you in leading the university, both internally and externally, that you are an academic knowledgeable about the university you are leading and its many and varied ‘constituencies.’ Cornell’s culture is fundamentally collaborative, a trait that comes from our founding ideals, our history and our environment, our small-town character and the closeness of our communities. I always felt that as provost, the fact that I was still running a lab, teaching and doing regular faculty work was a great advantage.”

In 2021, after 36 years of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health and 152 published papers (the last two of which were published this year), Kotlikoff closed his lab. It was not an easy decision, and he misses the research, the stints in the lab every Friday and, most of all, being a regular faculty member collaborating with colleagues.

“I know the faculty very well,” Kotlikoff said. “And I plan to be very accessible and as much a colleague as possible, even in the presidential role.”

Kotlikoff at the Charter Day Ceremony in 2015 with his wife, Carolyn McDaniel, professor of practice in CVM.

Kotlikoff is already planning open houses and receptions to foster connection and dialogue. After a year of political crossfire and campus protests, Kotlikoff intends to speak only on issues that directly impact the university and to highlight the unique attributes of Cornell – including its history and its ethos.

“Carl Becker’s ‘Freedom and Responsibility’ is a great introduction to Cornell’s culture. It challenges all of us to temper passions with reasoned discourse and civil engagement and to remember what we owe each other in this precious community,” Kotlikoff said. “I want to intensely engage students, staff and alumni, as well as faculty, socially and in listening sessions and committees.”

Unable to hunker down in his lab anymore, Kotlikoff anticipates spending time in the great outdoors. He and Carolyn live on 50 wooded acres with their two dogs; Carolyn has bees and chickens, and donkeys will soon join the menagerie.

“I like getting on my tractor at the end of the day,” Kotlikoff  said. “There’s always something to do. I like activities where you can just focus on mowing a field or making a trail through the woods.”

He and Carolyn have two children. Their daughter, Phoebe, a submarine officer with the U.S. Navy who married a fellow submarine officer, recently left the service and graduated from Harvard Law School. Their son, Emmett ’16, graduated from Cornell with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and currently works for Google.

When not hiking, putting up firewood, reading history, cooking with Carolyn or attending Big Red sporting events – activities he loves – Kotlikoff will be running a university, which he also loves.

“I never planned an administrative career,” he said. “I never thought about becoming a provost or a university president. For me, being a faculty member was the kind of enough that was ‘as good as a feast.’ But when opportunities arose, I said yes, because I would – and I will – do anything for Cornell.”

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