What do you want to be when you grow up?

Yearning and Being

“First tell yourself what you want to be; and then do what you need to do.”

                                  Epictetus (55-135)

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.”

                                  Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1955)

         When you were a child, did you have some big dreams about what you wanted to be when you grew up?  Almost every child does.  I wanted to be a doctor.  I would cut my dolls up to see what was inside them and then sew them back together.  I had one of those little medical kits with a pretend stethoscope and blood pressure cuff.  My mother assured me I could not be a doctor, but I could possibly become a nurse.  Those were the 50’s—girls didn’t get to think big.  As it turned out, I was really bad at such required classes as chemistry and higher math.  I had to adjust my yearning.

I became a counselor and massage therapist.  I studied the body-mind and taught others about it.  After many years of that, I yearned to be an artist.  And so it goes—life is a series of yearnings.  Most of the time, we tell ourselves, “I can’t do that.  I’m _ years old; it’s too late.”  I want to tell you, it is not too late.  So you won’t become Picasso, or Einstein, or Steinbeck.  So what!  You are not here to be one of them; you are here to be the very best you possible.  Dag Hammarskjold once quipped, “Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top.  Then you will see how low it was.”  The fact that you yearn for it is enough. 

My dad, a man not known for his eloquence, had a saying when talking to the men who worked for him.  “Get it, or get out!”  He had no patience with people who whined, ‘it’s too hard’ or ‘why me?’ or ‘I can’t’.  He believed that anybody who applied themselves could do whatever they wanted to do with diligence, persistence and hard work.  Maybe he believed that because he had done just that.

I encourage you to yearn--and to do what you need to do to achieve what you yearn for.  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It is still a good question.  There’s no better time than right now.

                          Keeping the faith,

                          Jane