The realization of dreams

 Returning to school after joining the working world 6 years ago is not a cake walk.  I am not the oldest student in the class but the majority of the students around me are about 6 years my junior.  This poses a number of problems when trying to relate to my classmates.  The most obvious difference is their perspective of the world and the role they will play in it.  Let me explain with an example.  Last week I left class and had some time to kill so I approached a group of my classmates sitting in the grass.  Not long after our introductions they began to role a joint (we were sitting 100 yards from the university entrance.)  I immediately put a wall up between me and them when I explained that I used to smoke a lot when I was in college, but had given it up a year ago.  "hmm you're in college now dummy."  Is probably what they were thinking.

As the marijuana took hold of their malleable minds, they began to share their dreams and aspirations in relation to what they were studying.  One kid wanted to become a lawyer and change the world by fighting for things like justice for Tibet, another kid wanted to study medicine so that he could discover a cure for currently incurable diseases, and the last wanted to study language so that he could travel the world living the dream of a wanderer.  This brought back memories of my own aspirations when I was an undergrad student.  First, I wanted to be a doctor so that I could join doctor's without boarders and save the world, then I wanted to teach languages and travel the world.  The first aspiration died when I passed out watching a rabbit get neutered and the second slowly became less of a whimsical dream and more of a hard reality when I realized it was not easy to find work abroad and programs that offered help were a rouse that drew a picture of you living and working comfortably in a foreign country when really they didn't pay you enough to live in more than a cardboard box and put you in charge of a classroom of 16 year old hooligans who had no interest in learning what you were trying to teach.  I then thought about how the last six years of my life had helped to sculpt my perspective of reality today.  It is not that these years killed my every hope and dream it is just that they dragged my feet back to the ground and reminded me that life is not always a flawless realization of your every dream.  I began to transform my hopes into tangible goals and learned that these goals were in fact the realization of my dreams.  I chose these two paintings as examples of dreams that come true but in a slightly different version than what we imagined as kids.  Both are images of when I went to visit my friend Gael in Thonon France.  The first is of a para-glider taking off from a mountain.  How many children say that one day they want to be able to fly?  Well this may not be flying but it is a way that an adult has adapted the dream of flight into a tangible reality.  The second is of a view from Gael's patio.  How many children say that they want to live in a castle by the sea?  Well his apartment may not have been a castle or even on the ocean, but it was an adorable flat in a historic fishing village right on lake Geneva with an incredible patio overlooking the lake.  All dreams do come true, just not exactly as we had imagined.