Wednesday, August 24, 2005
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Thus goes the standard question posed to children - their naïve responses at which you take with such amusement that is to be expected when a little one who comes up to your hip tells you he wants to be Superman.
Imagine that from the time you are born until you die, you hold a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. You begin life with a clean slate, no prior experiences or memories. With questions as such, you start writing down what your ideal life would be like in the next 10, 20 years. You do so with fervour, excited about what future the big, big world holds.
But as you go through the process of growing up, you find yourself looking for an eraser, because you need to rewrite your aspirations. You see, reality is a teacher whose mission is to tell you why everything you dream of doing would be most unfeasible. So you drag that eraser across what you have written before, and replace it with something else which conforms to the teacher’s expectations.
And as this cycle starts to gain momentum, you write with a little less force and conviction each time, expecting that you’re going to have to change it again sometime soon.
You began with a superhero, only to end up with a ragged piece of paper and a vague existence. And lurking in the background, amidst the shades of gray, are the faint traces of all that you’ve ever wanted to be.