I dream big. When I was young I dreamt of world dominance, genius, invention… being the best of everything, having everything, having it my way, every single way.
I was an idealist in the purest sense. A ruthless idealist.
As a little kid, I liked being outside, but I didn't really like rules. I wanted a farm. A dominion of creation. I liked big open spaces, and I was brought up with a very manicured conception of the outdoors such that my idea of being organic was still subject to high aesthetic standards. Around the age of eight, I thought that the neatly-raked sand traps in my neighborhood's golf course were much more interesting when I added sandcastles and heart designs. But when I was caught decorating by a grumpy old golfer man and accosted, I ran home even grumpier. It took years of social conditioning to accept inaction -- years of hearing, "don't do that", "wait your turn", "maybe next time", "you're too young", and "that's impossible"-- until I accepted that the entire world was probably already uniformly the way it was meant to be… suburban.
Eventually my dreams got smaller, until I didn't really care if I had any dreams at all. I had accepted that fruits and vegetables didn't come from farms, they came from chilly, fluorescent-lit stores, populated by the clanking of grocery carts and the clicking of well-heeled moms on Flagship Randall's stone-tiled floors, and that all my attempts to plant apple cores in our stately backyard were actually littering offenses.
In later years I thought that my childhood desires signaled some profound proof of social injustice. Of course I was wrong, and too comfortable to understand that suburban Texas already had the greatest upper hand. I just really wanted to grow stuff. I had so many big dreams become so very grand, so detailed, so built up in my head, that I was convinced there would be years of round-about means and un-doing the system before any of them could come true, and when they ever did, I would probably have to choose one among all of them. So I set the hypothetical deadlines for my dreams so far into the future that they seemed out of reach. Until one day, with the encouragement and help of a friend, I took my mom's minivan to the the Home Depot, and loaded it up with shovels, several pounds of organic soil, and various seeds. Soon, we transformed a five by nine foot patch of my backyard into a lush garden. Finally, I had a farm…
I am so lucky that some of my dreams have come true. It's easy to forget that they can when it feels like no one believes in your dreams. To this day I still have elaborate dreams, scribbled on various pages of unfinished to-do lists with undefined deadlines. Everything is better with a friend, but life often leaves one alone. Too often I find myself walking the line of idealism and defeatism. I know I just need to take the first step myself, even if having a push would be nice. Moderation is so much better than inaction, and there is still so much to grow.
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| This is where I grew up... garden not visible. |
Right now I dream of escaping Hopkins... but I know the only way out is through... Final Exams always give me such a feeling of dispair... truly the academic world forces me into existential crises...
