Staten Island Ferry

I was riding the Staten Island Ferry this morning. It was a cold, blustery day. I sat on the plastic green seats, staring out at the vast ocean waves and the seagulls flapping awkwardly near the hull of the ferry. I was thinking about life when I suddenly thought, “Life is too short to live someone else’s dream.” I don't know why it came back to me, but it made me think something about myself. Maybe I’m hypocritical. Maybe I tell OTHER people to live their own dreams while I did not do the same. I felt like a sage who did not follow her own advice, a preacher who did not believe her own sermons. I mean, here I was, IN grad school, and for what? To pursue someone else’s dream? I definitely did not plan on going to grad school when I was younger. I didn’t plan on a lot of things. But I made them happen anyway. Then I began to doubt myself. I began to ask if I was really doing this for me or if I was doing what my family wanted, what society expected. In spite of all my individualism and “find my own path” mentality, I still felt like I had sold out somehow. That I had given in the pressures of society. I felt like I had put my values in the wrong thing. Not to say that higher education is an invalid value. I know that I’m doing something for my future. I know that I’m doing something for myself, even if it means getting into a mountain of debt. Yet somehow, I feel as if this was not what I wanted. I feel like I had postponed living my life just to gamble on something that COULD be better and yet may not be. Truthfully, I was tired of the uncertainty. I was tired of the doubt. I was tired of the DEBT. And not just the debt I owed to the government for my loans, the debt I owed to my parents, to make them proud because they had given me life and raised me. I felt like my life stretched on ahead and THAT debt would never be gone. It would never evaporate or diminish.

I looked out at the New York City skyline in the distance, the tall spires and skyscrapers in the air. I thought about my dream to live there and how much it was going to cost me. I saw the Statue of Liberty and thought about how immigrants--poor, illiterate, and uneducated--somehow made a living there. I watched the seagulls as they wheeled in the air, veering towards the ferry and then banking away. I thought about how free they were…and how cold they must be sometimes. Yet they didn’t LOOK cold. They didn’t look empty and hollow, like there was a void in their lives which they were trying to fill with all the wrong things. All the wrong things. 

Then again, maybe I'm not doing this for the wrong reasons. Maybe I'm not trying to fill up my life with all the wrong things. Maybe everything WILL work out, in spite of all my doubts. Like Steve Jobs said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking back." Maybe now is not the time to look back on my life. Not yet anyway. 

Not yet.