“Be the person whom you admired as a child,but many. Who’s determining what a “child” is? Should I be the paleontologist I admired when I was six? Should I be the figure skater I admired when I was nine? Should I be the teacher I admired at age 14? Or should I be the journalist I admire now, at age 19?
Trying to live with no regrets while also living the average daily life is something that is starting to weigh on me, now that I realize that I am about a quarter of my way through my life. There’s so many things that I could be doing -- but how do I follow my dreams when they're not what seems to be in my future?
At a young age, we change our dreams of the future on a daily basis. It’s easy for a toddler to go through a day saying he wants to be a teacher, a firefighter, a singer, and a doctor. As we age, we become a little less choosy in what we want our futures to be -- we stick to one general field. Then, as we are headed into the real world, we must choose one career that we would like our whole lives to center around, usually with no option of changing it in the future unless you are trained in another field. The dreams we had may still be there -- like being a pre-med major, or an education major, or being in the army -- but now we realize this is our whole life. This is what we chose.
I have stuck with my dream of being a music teacher since 7seventh grade, and now I am entering my second year of college majoring in music education. But I still sometimes look back and wonder what could have happened if I had just stuck with figure skating when I was younger. What could have happened if I had spent more time learning about biology in high school. Or, what I would become if I changed my major to journalism or communication. Could I have been the next Kristi Yamaguchi competing in the 2018 Olympics? Could I have been a pre-med major, right now, learning about optics to become your future ophthalmologist? Could I be exposing new viewpoints on global issues that aren’t covered by mass media to alert the nation of possible danger?
We learn to settle with just one of our dreams. I am blessed to be following my dream and actively working to be something that I admired as a child. I’m starting to realize that being as diverse of a person that I want to be simply isn’t possible, though.
Whether we consider it settling for a single dream or being given the opportunity to follow a dream we have, the harsh reality is that we cannot be good at everything we want to be. There will be regrets in life. It’s our job, then, to learn from those regrets and better ourselves for what we could be doing in our futures. Being the person whom you admired as a child is a phrase in singular form: you cannot be everything, you cannot accomplish everything, you cannot have enough time to follow every single one of your dreams that you may have.
You can be a person -- just one person -- so you should make sure the one person that you are is passionate about something and following a dream. No, we cannot accomplish everything we may want to in a lifetime and some opportunities have passed. Take hold of the opportunities that you can, right now, so someday you will be able to look back and think of how one passion changed your life for the better.
