We are often asked, when we are young, what we want to be when we grow up. A child's answer to this question is often a confident one: Astronaut! Scientist! Teacher! Mummy say doctor is good! And we repeat it - don't we? - whenever we are asked, all the way into primary school, because the very idea of being an astronautscientistteacherdoctor is exciting to our young minds. It's the same way a young professional may feel when he walks into a Saville Row store, credit card strapped tight in a back pocket, the idea of a credit rating alien in the afterglow of a first paycheck. He doesn't yet comprehend the work needed to compensate for his new suit, the same way we couldn't yet comprehend the cost/payout ratios of our childhood ambitions. This changes soon enough.
Ask a teenager now, anywhere on a street, what he wants to be when he grows up, and you'll more often than not get a blank stare in return. Something has changed in the years between the confident 'Astronaut!' and the evasive 'I don't know.' - and I can assure you that it isn't just the cost/payout ratio. A teenager is frightened by many things, some of them universal (the ridicule of peers, for instance) and some of them senseless. This fear of ambition is both universal and senseless, but it carries on in many of us, way into adulthood, because it is rarely (if ever) an outright threat. Most of us, in fact, learn to work around it; some of these may lead well-to-do, often happy lives. Others lead unexamined ones, and therefore do not care at all.
This essay is a thesis on growing up. It is written for the person I see whenever I look into the mirror, because that person is often terribly confused. The context is this: I am going to have to choose what I want to be when I grow up very, very soon. And I'm not very confident about it, because all around me are signs that this is one drawing that I'll have to do in a no-eraser zone. If you're in the same boat as I am, with sharpened pencils and blank canvasses, and the great fear of putting one to the other, then you're welcomed to join me. I promise not to waste your time.
Let us consider the life of a child. This child is born into a world where the major variables have already been decided for him: family, nationality, intelligence, socio-economic status. His parents decide which kindergarten he goes to, which schools he attends, and later on the subtle variables like which exams to take and which streams to go into. His parents are the Gods of his world, and he grows up in a life determined by them. He lives for them.
The child then enters a brief sanctuary, after high school, perhaps, or the period between starting college and entering a first job. These are the years where he can choose - he decides what to do with his life, who to allow in, where he is going to live. How he is going to live it. Then the rest of everything comes around knocking, and he has to think of other things. A wife. Children. A mortgage; car payments. He is working his butt off for these entities now - his children are the Gods of his life (how is he going to get them through college?) and he wakes up one day, middle-aged, kids gone off to school, and wonders: What have I done with myself? What happened to all the astronautscientistteacherdoctor? My dreams? Plans? Where did these all go to?
And the painful one: What could I do differently, if I were to live my life again?
This is a question worth asking now, all the teenagers stuck thinking about careers. If you lived your life for your parents, and then your college loan, and then your mortgage, and then your kids ... when are you going to live your life for yourself? If you're going to choose something to live for, what would it be?
The title of this essay is taken from a poem. It's called Song, written by John Donne, and the first stanza goes like this:
Go and catch a falling star,The lyrical structure of the rhyme probably means very little, but note well that stars do not appear in the day. It is for this reason that we can only catch stars before dawn, the same way we can only chase dreams in the chaotic period between childhood and adulthood. The years between leaving school and starting a first job is when we are singularly responsible for our futures. The years before belong to our parents, and the years after are increasingly difficult for us to change all that we've build up, regardless of whether it's any worth to us at all. There are, of course, cases of people defying conventions and doing what they want, right smack in middle age, but these people are the rare ones, with the courage of their convictions and the ability to scale the brick walls around them. The rest accept the compromises of middle life and downgrade their ambitions: some live vicariously through their children; others take pride in things they did not set out to be proud in - their orchids, for instance, or their local bookclub. Little joys, tiny beauties to get by with.
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
The sheer possibility in these few, pivotal years is one of the causes of the blank 'I don't know!'s you get the world over. Teenagers know, on some primal, subconscious level, that this is one of the few instances where a whole life hinges on a single decision. We understand that not making a choice is not an option at all - sometime sooner or later we'll have to choose, and it had better be a good one. Till then, however, we clam up, trapped in some kind of circuit overload, hoping to delay the time when we face the inevitable. We say - to ourselves, to everyone else - 'I don't know.'
There's also the tricky question of responsibility. Teenagers have never ever in their short lives had such power to choose what to do with it. It's like taking a monkey out of a zoo and supplanting it right smack in the tropical rainforest. The monkey has no clue to its newfound freedom, so it awaits dinner at the foot of a tree, and ends up being the meal of a Bengal tiger. These twin obstacles of possibility and sudden responsibility render most of us helpless, scared to our very core, despite being a fear that - when you really look at it (perhaps with the benefit of distance and hindsight) is senseless. But then again it is universal.
Or is it?
We often forget that the fear of ambitions is limited to a select, fortunate few. There are those, stuck in poverty, war or natural disaster, who do not have the liberty to ponder upon what they want to do with their lives. Everyday is a fight for survival: against disease, rape, fireball. And tragedy doesn't just strike the bowel nations of the earth: it can happen to you and me, any moment of any day. If we allow ourselves to be morbid, for an instance, imagine: what happens to your plans if a family member - a breadwinner - dies? Or if you have to enter the working world supporting a terminally ill relative? The sheer randomness of life - the cruelty of it, in fact - turns even the best laid plans into cosmic jokes.
Regardless, there are those who know exactly what they want to be when they grow up. From 6 to 60 their ambitions stays the same - and while the path changes their goal remains ever fixed in their heads. I envy these people. Their certainty comes from some God-hand, and we must seem like mindless plebeians running around in circles to them. I've a friend who has wanted to be a doctor since - well, since time immemorial, I suppose - and her choices in academia are simple and clear-cut. She has no idea how beautiful her gift is - the confidence to believe that it would somehow all come together in the end, sometime in the future; the certainty of it. What a wonderful thing to have.
College is a strange thing. Verily it is the gateway into the working world; the golden ticket to the chocolate factory of adulthood, but this wasn't always so. In the medieval ages teenagers were recruited into guilds and schooled in the secrets of their chosen trade, then sent off as apprentices to master their craft. Later on they become guildsmen; further down the road they become masters. The differences here being that their working educations started very young, and the opportunities available were limited by blood, influence, or luck. Career counseling was out of the question.
But the colleges of today fare no better in helping the average teenager manage the leap from student to working tradesman, in an age of unlimited opportunity. I can safely say, for instance, that the middle class can be whatever they want to be here and now in the modern world. But how many squander this opportunity? How many surrender the responsibility of choosing to their parents, school counselors, college entrance salesmen? How many believe in the lie of a career they do not love, when they see their fellow coursemates working their asses off to get a degree? These people, who do not bother to examine their lives, wake up one day in the light to find their sky void of the stars they had when they were younger. And they become bitter; or they learn to never, ever examine their lives when they have the time.
The other question about colleges is this: is it really necessary? The list of people making it big without ever finishing a college education is long and growing: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Madonna (this one is interesting: Madonna was a straight-A student who left University despite being on a dance scholarship); Richard Branson, Coco Chanel, Simon Cowell, Michael Dell. All their stories involve great personal courage and sacrifice, and they all involve people finding and doing what they love. In contrast, the list of people who graduate and go on to the glory of warming an office seat is long and endless; the people who graduate and never find what they love because of their degree ever-growing. Their reasoning is such: I've spent so much time and money to get a degree, to buy security, that I can't not do something connected to it.
This reasoning is fine and dandy, really, if that degree is an gateway to a career the person loves. But if it isn't - and here is the risk, for how do you know what you like when you're 19 and picking a course? - then the degree is not security, nor is it an enabler: it is a piece of paper costly of purchase and insignificant of build - nothing more than an extra brick wall in a life rapidly filling with them; walls that reach higher each year, every year, after dawn.
All essays must end with answers. Good ones, if the essay is worthy of a second read. I promised not to waste your time at the beginning of this essay, but now I must be frank: these are my answers. My dogma. Don't believe in them anymore than you should believe your parents, your career counselors, or those annoying salespeople you meet in booths at career fests. Your life is yours to examine, and the choices yours to make. Make them well.
That being said, let's examine the lives of all those who have succeeded in living their lives the way they wanted despite never graduating. What made them succeed? It surely wasn't college - they never completed it, did they? Nor was it money - these people came from different socio-economic backgrounds: Bill Gates was born rich, but Coco Chanel (she of Chanel No.5) started out as a seamstress. And these people are of every race and philosophy you can possibly imagine.
The best answers - or some of them - I have found are hinted at in a 2005 commencement speech by Steve Jobs.
... you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
All these people (and if you really think about it, even those who did complete college) had the courage to just go out and do things. They didn't fret, they didn't dally. Madonna quit University while on dance scholarship, Dell quit college to work on a small PC company, Branson dropped out at 16 to start a student newsletter. There was no way any of them could have known if this was the big thing, the job they'd be doing for the rest of their lives. They didn't play inside the box - they did crazy, they followed their hearts, and they had the courage to believe everything would all work out in the end. This is idealistic, this is, but it is also one of the strongest arguments for religion I can think of - who else can you expect would have the ability to connect everything so beautifully for you, at the end of the road? Science, while wonderful, isn't quite there yet.
The second thing Steve talks about is love. In his words (and probably because he is of greater wisdom than a teenager, ergo, me):
... that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
The difference here is not the college, the degree, or the socio-economic status. These people found what they loved, never settled, and always believed that God/karma/spongebob would somehow connect the dots for them in the end. And then, once they found what they were looking for, they worked hard. Very hard. It didn't matter if they started out poor, and it didn't matter if they had to overcome some significant challenges along the way. Oprah, for instance, got raped, but that didn't stop her now, did it?
The upshot of all this is that star-catching can happen no matter where you are. No matter what family you were born into. And it can happen at any time of day, provided you have the heart to do it. And for people like me - the star-catchers before dawn? We live in the sweet-spot, the perfect place to be if we just realize this truth and act on it.
I wish you all the best in catching that falling star.
