Consider the following comments on revolution.
Every revolution begins as a hope and is judged by what it builds the morning after.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
The hardest part of overthrowing the old order is not hating it but replacing it.
We carry small revolutions inside us long before we dare to act on any of them.
Some things in a life can only be changed all at once or not at all.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that revolution, whether in a country or a single life, is easy to romanticise and hard to survive, because the thrill of overturning what was is followed by the labour of living with what comes next. Open with a concrete personal turning point, a sudden break with a belief, a relationship, a way of life, where the rupture felt like liberation. Then move inward to the tension: the moment of breaking is vivid and almost intoxicating, but the long, unglamorous work of rebuilding is where the real test lies. A useful structural move contrasts the version of yourself that craved the dramatic change with the version that had to inhabit the aftermath. Caution: resist the tidy lesson that bold change always pays off, since some revolutions, personal and political, simply trade one disappointment for another and the honest ending admits it.