“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
As a little girl, I answered this question with an air of confidence:
“When I grow up I’m going to be a Doctor” (insert silly grin here please)
I was so determined to make that childish declaration a reality and bragged about it to my mom and dad. I was going to be a doctor. I was going to heal people and save lives. Nothing was going to change my mind. Period.
But something happened when I was in high school. I discovered that I had this weird aversion to blood and it changed the way I viewed how “Doctor-hood” should be. I mean, I thought Doctors just healed people and gave them medicine to make the sickness “go away”. Unfortunately a doctor is not only confined to those simple tasks. I learned about this many years ago while watching a New Year’s special by the now defunct Magandang Gabi Bayan hosted by Noli de Castro.
The New Year’s special was actually about the number of victims of fireworks-related injuries that year. It was a very bloody episode. I saw some people missing fingers in their hands; some had blood on their faces, on their arms, legs, eyes and almost every part of their body. I cringed at the sight of blood and most importantly at the thought of me tending to victims of such fate. It was at that moment I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor after all.
It was this very incident that I came to realize this one simple truth: That as kids we really know what we want. We have this fixed idea of what we really want to be, what we want to have and achieve. We see ourselves achieving something, becoming somebody. BUT when we grow up, we begin to see the picture---that the ideal is not always what’s real.
We think that we know that we really want something; we have this idea of what we want but then life tells you that “REALITY is different from what’s IDEAL honey”. Just like in love. We have this idea of who we really want in life. Like I’ve always had this vision of what my future husband would be: tall, skinny (not very), mestiso, rich, gwapo, kind and most importantly someone who loves me unconditionally. But does someone like that exist in real life??? I think not (or if ever he does exist, he must not come from this planet).
We literally plan out our lives. We plan our lives the moment we figure out what we really want. We start our day out with a plan. We map out what we do for a certain hour of the day, where we go, who we meet. We have a mental time line of what we need to do. But the real world does not match our idealistic visions. Mostly we are left to adjust to the less planned real world about 80% of the time.
So what happens if our plans don’t work out? Should we throw a fit because it didn’t work out the way you wanted it to? We should always remember that it's not so much the “ideal” that we crave, but rather the striving for it that gives life its purpose. Some days you have to just sit back, shake your head, laugh a little, and refocus on your blessings... :)
