I once had a teacher who showed me the meaning of life. He was an eccentric character, who saw the world in a way that was different from everything I had ever known. He was one of those people that really made you stop and think about life and the way in which you lived it. The eccentric part I could tell right from the second I walked through the classroom door, it was his views that took a while to unfold. Now, I don’t mean to say that he wasn’t opinionated – because he was – he just waited to tell you the things that really mattered.

I don’t think that this was to do with the general assumption that he didn’t want us knowing what he thought of the world; honestly, I think it’s the fact that most of my class didn’t want to know. After all, we are teenagers and the only thing we really cared about was how to get from our doorstep to the mall. We weren’t interested in changing our lifestyle, and maybe it just took him a while to move past all of that unintentional criticism.

The world is a beautiful place if you really get out in it. Because, through the hatred and the homelessness, the anger and abuse, there is always a perfect place to start healing wounds. He taught me that. Until I met him, I believed that things happened for a reason and that one person couldn’t change that. Turns out I was wrong – he taught me that as well.

There was something about his looks that people either loved or hated. He was one of the rare cases where I truly believe that the person on the outside is not a clear example of the person underneath. One look at him, and you would assume what everyone else did. He was a drama teacher who also taught English class because they needed another teacher. Looks define people, however sometimes incorrectly.

He had a one-of-a-kind laugh; one I remember well, only because I heard it so rarely. Sometimes it was almost a shock to the system when he did laugh – however, for an emotion he didn’t display often, I enjoyed it when he did. It reminded me that he was real. Sure, he was alive and breathing, but it was the simple case that he managed to be a living, breathing person who truly understood troubled hearts that sometimes had me questioning whether or not he really was human.

He had worked several different jobs most of he managed to reflect back fondly, and, while he may have been good at them, he was an excellent teacher. It wasn’t, however, because he had the best lessons, assigned less homework that most teachers, or let us watch movies during a good portion of our classes, it is now, instead, back to the case of simple cases: it was because he was so easy to talk to.

Every time I talked to him, he would turn to me and his ice-blue eyes would pierce into my hazel ones. It was an intensity, but not the kind that intimidated, more so the kind that welcomed. They were so welcoming, in fact, that they would lock you in, and all of a sudden you’d trust him. Not just with your secrets, or the hidden truths of everything that you believed. It wasn’t just with what who you really saw when you looked in the mirror or the real reason that you wrote so many stories about death and other depressing topics. He would look at you, and you would trust him, because there was a purity in his gaze that made it easy to believe that all he really wanted to do was help.

He truly believed in me. Of that I also remember well. He saw the potential in me that few people ever had. However, it wasn’t just that he saw the potential; he made sure that I saw it in myself, which, admittedly, most people had never tried doing before. I’m known to be stubborn and independent. The secret behind being stubborn and independent was instead the fact that I was scared of people. I was scared of what they thought and I was scared that they would hurt me. I was so scared of people that I managed to build a reputation of not caring about people – an irony that he managed to see past in a heartbeat.

This man showed me the meaning of life. It wasn’t to get the best grades or to end up with a successful career. It wasn’t to have the most friends or to build the best family. No, it was more than that. The meaning of life was, simply, to live.