Have You Ever? What Then?

"He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lives a great street-sweeper who did his job well.'" -- Martin Luther King Jr.

Have you ever wondered what happened to your classmate in grade school who sang very much like Lea Salonga? Or have you ever tried flipping pages of your old yearbooks back in pre-school asking yourself if John the bully ever became the doctor he said he wanted to be? Have you salvaged your old high school paper of your graduation and reckoned if your valedictorian now has a Ph.D. degree in Biology? But perhaps we need not to look that far. Have we ever asked ourselves, did we become the person we once dreamed of becoming back as a child?

Well I have.

My yearbook in pre-school says I wanted to become a doctor someday to help save the sick and the poor. Only to find out that growing up I was never good at Biology and I often get scared of blood. Poof! There goes my ambition.

But that was just about my first dream. My second and stronger desire came in when I was finishing Grade school until early in my high school years. I wanted to become a journalist writing for a respectable publication. It was a long shot I told myself but not at all impossible. Besides, I know I have the skills. After all I was competing in writing competitions, national press cons and debates at that time. And as I finish my secondary education, this dream escalated to wanting to become the next Jessica Soho. I wanted to become a broadcaster. And back then when I was feeling all nationalistic, I envision myself fighting off bad apples in the government and advocating about human rights. Armed with that I became confident, ready even, to embrace this aspiration.

But then again I failed to realize that being a real journalist isn’t just about knowing grammar and memorizing the Journalist Creed but about being passionate, just, hardworking, responsible and brave. These are things you never learn academically. And these things never happen overnight. Reality is, even if I did come from a very good university, I won’t appear on camera the next day. You toil first into being an assistant or researcher for years before appearing on television. And even before you start as an employee, you need to face first the very stressful screening process of examinations and interviews. Add to that, you are competing against dozens of other hopefuls. These are people with the same dream as yours, who are also from reputable universities and some are even with cum laude tags on their resumes. And the best part of all is that there are only two positions open for all of you.

And so to cut the story short, I never became the broadcast journalist I once dreamed of becoming, I gave it up. Instead, I am now working for a car dealership of a well-known brand also hit by the global recession. I still write a few articles, a good stress–reliever for me, and post them here even if everyone else does it, even the ones who cuts and pastes someone else’s original write–ups, just to earn money through online adsense, kind of lucrative actually.

Now that I am working full-time as manager, I came to realize that even my day to day task is still about dreaming, though in management trainings we now call it vision - to envision an end and work on the means. The same is true in real life, we idealize on having a good living – nice house, stable job, happy family, quite easy to do actually, as easy as dreaming to be a doctor in Kindergarten, but the ways of achieving them is not at all simple.

We only have one life to live, and how we live it all starts with how we dream (visualize) ourselves to be. But more importantly, since we are the architects of our lives and all are conspired based on our experience, wants and needs, we can ask, who do we sell our brains to? That’s why in this world we live in we have jails for criminals (hopefully with a pack of corrupt officials being the worst of them) and monuments for heroes and saints. Our dreams dictate what role we want to play in society. And these roles, no matter how small or big, are what mold our humanity.

My grade school classmate who had that wonderful voice like Lea Salonga didn’t become a singer, although I’ve seen her before competing in singing contests on TV. I heard she went on to become a nurse. John the bully inherited their family’s business and became an entrepreneur. And our high school valedictorian hasn’t earned her Ph.D. yet and I don't think she ever would.

As for me, I dreamed to be a journalist and I’m selling my brain now to Chinese businessmen to sell cars. Though this blog allows me to be the so-called writer/journalist I wanted to be.

Finally, like me, you may have dreamed of being this somebody when you were young and turned out to be someone else. There’s always time – time to finally ask myself, what could have happened if I did get that journalism job at first…

What could have been if we all pushed on with dreaming and worked to achieve it? What then happens to society when all roles are played with passion and with zeal? When brains are sold according to innocent and simple wants? What then.