How is it that we even as children can imagine a life that we have never before known? How is it possible that we can engage in such a complex thinking process years before we are even capable of surviving on our own? We can be five years old and want to be a doctor or if you were like me, a major league baseball player. Why? We don't need a job. All our bills are being paid. We have food, shelter, clothing, toys, chauffeurs, a personal bodyguard and even a private chef. Heck, we had it all! What was the motivation to change? We never had it better.
Even when we were little, we thought big. We want it all. We wanted to play sports, to be in movies, to become tall, dark and handsome, to be older. What were we thinking?
We couldn't wait to be teenagers when we were in elementary school. Then it was to be sixteen and able to drive. Then eighteen [now twenty-one] to be able to legally consume adult beverages and vote. Then to be twenty-one and to graduate from college. Then at twenty-nine we came to our senses and wished we were twenty-five again and counting down.
Can you remember when all we could do was crawl? I know I'm asking a lot here:) But come on, think back. Did we ever have it made! We were carried everywhere. Adults jumped to meet our every need. We could cry, whine, and basically act like a baby and still the world would revolve around us. Oh how those were the days!
But we couldn't leave well enough alone, now could we? We had to start trying to walk, and at what cost? Falling over and over again, we certainly weren't naturals. But we insisted. We stumbled our way through it. And then as soon as we could, we made a run for it. We may not be like that now, but when we were toddlers we were stubbornly ambitious humans.
There is something inside that drives us. Call it ambition, passion, rebellion, competition, independence, whatever -- it manifests itself in different ways, but it's in us from the very beginning. The human spirit longs to become. "Become what?" one might ask. It hardly seems to matter. We are motivated by an endless number of things, but they have one thing in common, they are always big.
We humans are dreamers. We don't so much as grow into this as much as it too seems to be a factory defect. In fact, when we are young and less grounded in reality, we dream bigger and more ridiculous dreams. I remember one three year-old boy who wanted to become a fire truck when he got older. Our ambitions and aspirations can be absolutely out of control when we're in our pre-adolescent years. We tend to be like young Leo in the movie Titanic, standing on the bow of the ship, shouting for all creation to hear, "I'm the king of the world." He wasn't, you know.
Though we seem to get it in different measures and intensities, all of us long to become. We are born with an instinct for not only survival but also accomplishment. There is a fire inside each of us that propels us forward. We are designed to learn, to adapt, to grow, to change, to develop, to progress, to become. Especially when we are children, we have endless energy that fuels play, curiosity and imagination. Even from childhood we naturally move towards our future. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who lamented that imagination was wasted on the young. But it was Albert Einstein, on the other hand, who attributed the key to his genius as never losing his childhood curiosity.
As we grow into adulthood, these intensify into passion, desire, drive and ambition. Throughout our lives, we express these desires as we strive to achieve, to accomplish and to attain. We are all custom made for a future. All of us long for our lives to count in some way. We all have an internal need to achieve some kind of success or to somehow find significance. Another factory defect if you will. Pursuing the future that we desire energizes and inspires us. It appears in different forms, but in this we all share the same defect. Every one of us longs to create even when we don't know exactly what. All of us, at the very least, want to create a better life, a better future, a better us. To surrender these aspirations leads to apathy and despair.
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