I was in the cafeteria today evening when I couldn't help but overhear a lovely lady comment on her four year old's ambition to become the Miss World . "There we go !" I thought. How many of us have passed through a similar phase where we wanted to become Engine Drivers, Cops , teachers , Cricketers . Some of us even wanted to become the next Sachin , Lata Mangeshkar and may be the President of our country one day.
Those were the times weren't they ? When we had no idea of what it took to be a teacher or a President. We could dream to our heart's content , unfettered by the reality of life . When did we stop dreaming and start cribbing? May be it was when we realised that life is a perpetual struggle but we did not have the tenacity to fight for our dream , May be we lost our path while we gave life to our loved one's dream : of parents wanting a successful engineer son / daughter , who followed the set conventions , May be we were afraid of getting ridiculed . There can be so many reasons for giving our dreams up but what matters is : Are we still happy without that particular dream to follow ?
I've seen people who did an engineering course just because their parents wanted them to. They spent their entire four years of UG cribbing about the syllabus , the institution and the unfair nature of life etc etc. It generally does not improve when they start their careers , they wake up only to start yearning for the day to end , sleepwalk through the day when at work , come back switch on the idiot box and gaze stupidly into it. These people are mood killers , something akin to the dementors of the Harry Potter series : Get too close to them and some of that depression may rub onto you.
There is the other extreme , those who are lucky / have the guts to follow their dream and struggle to succeed in their endeavour , ready to face all challenges / roadblocks , no matter how difficult or tough they are. These people are the busy bees . They can never rest until they achieve their dreams. Whenever they are ridiculed , they take that as an encouragement to succeed and in the end manage to reach the nearest summit point , if not the peak.
There is another category to which some people fall into . They may have given up their dream to take up some one else's but they accept the reality of that and learn to enjoy what they are doing . They may not have their one supreme dream as their vocation , but given a chance , they may slake their desire by doing some minute things which may resemble what they wanted to do. These people are realists and they make the best out of what life throws at them.
We may love to be someone and do something and life may give us something different . How we cope up with makes us what we will become. We can be mood killers ,walking through life but not living it or we can be realists taking life as it comes , living it to the fullest even if its not the one we wanted.
Some of us may be the lucky busy bees who enjoy what we do which is what we want. For others its a simple option . We can accept life's compromise and proceed further or crib through our lives , getting depressed and affecting others. So if not a busy bee , become a realist.
