Dreams & Plans

When I was 6, I made my first life plan. I was going to grow up and be a pilot. I knew it the day I first stepped into an airport and watched planes majestically take off and land at the runway. I knew it the moment I saw the smart looking pilots in their uniforms walk out of the cockpit and into the tarmac. I wanted to fly all over the world and see places other people only dreamed about.

Then I became a 12 year old boy putting on his first pair of glasses knowing it meant the end of his plan to be a pilot. But that was okay. I had another plan. The spectacles actually hid my squinty eyes well, and made me look smarter than I really was. So I decided I was going to be a lawyer, or broker, or something like that; Actually, I just wanted to be anything that involved you wearing spectacles, a vest and looking like you know what you’re talking about. For some reason, I was convinced I would make not only an excellent lawyer, but a mind blowing, awesome one at that.

Something about being young and naïve; you often believe you can pretty much do anything your mind can conceive. If asked if you can or cannot do something, the default answer would be ‘yes’. But somehow, as we grow older, that ‘yes’ slowly turns into a ‘maybe’ and eventually into a ‘no’. Ask any pool of kids who can sing and dance and chances are almost all would say yes. Ask the same question to adults, and chances are almost all would say no. Ever noticed that?

But I think after hearing one too many lawyer jokes, my enthusiasm for the court of law wasn’t quite there by the time I was coming out of my teens. By then, I had no idea what I wanted to be anymore. But that was still okay. Because I still had another plan..or something like that. And the plan was basically just to make a lot of many. Not too much..just enough for me do whatever I wanted without ever having to worry about money. Something like a gozillian dollars would be enough. Didn’t matter if I was a pilot, lawyer or New York sidewalk sweeper (which I heard actually earn a lot of money), as long as it was enough.

But the dream of seeing the world never quite left me. When trying to pick a college to go do, I went ahead and did my research on all the international universities anyway, half convincing myself that my family will somehow afford it, and my exam results would be good enough for a scholarship, both of which I of course knew were lies invented to deceive myself.

Top of my list was a small little town Down Under by the name of Adelaide, Australia. I had gone to a local college that had a twinning programme with the University of Adelaide. The course didn’t excite me, but I fell in love the pictures that I saw of the place. By the time I walked out of the place, my mind was already transported thousands of miles away into a charming little western styled village town with nothing but pretty buildings, green grass and blue skies. Oh how I yearned for that fantasy to come true.

Alas, it was not my fate. The realist part of me kind of knew all along where I’d really end up; that well known but not too well regarded community college that both my father and brother attended. It wasn’t that bad… but the college had gone way past its former glory days of being a pioneer in tertiary education in the country, and frankly had the reputation of being cheap(er) more than anything else. Don’t ask me how or why, but I somehow ended up picking an engineering course because I thought it was ‘cool’. Someone should have given me a smack in the head back then. Anyway…. bizarrely, I actually got accepted.

By then, I had run out of dreams. If there was any left, it was just to graduate and get a decent job. The magic was all gone. The belief that you can do anything you want to was all gone. I was neither going to end up in the occupation of my childhood dreams, and I was not going to earn a gozillian dollars before 30 like that Yahoo! dude Jerry Yang….

I still believed in the virtues of hard work, industriousness and fulfilling the potentials we were born with, but I guess I finally gave up trying to believe that I was anything extraordinary. In fact, I was as ordinary as the person next to me in the community college. And I think that notion has stuck with me ever since; that I am ordinary; that I am nothing spectacular; that I’m not anymore ‘special’ than the person before or after me. Perhaps it has been a self-defeating belief for me, but I stopped buying into all the hyped up talk generated by the self-help motivational book industry that each and every one of us has limitless potential, that all of us can be great, that all of us can be successful in life and that it’s as simple as mind over matter. Because I already believed all that when I was a kid, long before I even knew what a self-help book was, and it didn’t work.

Here’s what I started believing instead. That it is our God given duty to live our life the best we can; to do what we can, with what we have, to the best of our abilities. Then after all that is done, regardless of how far or near it takes you, to learn to be contented with your lot in life. Then, to learn to see as they truly are. That people matter more than things. That success is as treacherous as failure. That relationships matter more than achievements.That bonds are better than networks. That money is many things, but it’s not everything. That true happiness is found not in objects, but in people. That if we do not have love in our life, we have nothing.

Those are the kind of things I eventually ended up believing in. Things that I suppose even my six year old self knew all along yet somehow forgot when growing up.

Today, I still can’t say I’m a man with a plan. But at least, I have a dream again. And I dream that one I will be able to look back on my life and say ‘Things did not turn out the way I hope them to, I made more mistakes than I possibly could have imagined, I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t always know if what I was doing was right, but that’s OK. Because through sweat and tears, joy and laughter, mistakes and mishaps, victories and triumphs, I have lived life to its fullest and to the best I possibly could. I have lived all the days of my life, and there is no other way I would have done it.'

Will that day ever come? I dunnoo. But that's why it's called a dream right?