Be, What You Want to Be
Most children are plagued by the question, “so what do you want to be when you grow up?” And if there aren’t enough people asking them that, they themselves wonder what their future holds for them.
But isn’t the question itself so limiting in nature? Why should anyone be made to define their future within the framework of a job description?
Also, the moment you make that call, there are a series of obvious and sometimes pretentious reasons that make up your full declaration speech. A budding doctor will talk about the desire to heal people, an engineer-to-be will talk about the love of tinkering and the freedom of creation, a journalist will want to bring out the real story. And really how different are these reasons from the justifications of a Ms. Universe aspirant, who is there because she wants to bring about world peace.
Another limitation is that making such choices restrains you from thinking beyond the path that will naturally lead you to the chosen goal. For example, to be a doctor, you need to find the right medical college, study hard for the entrance exams, arrange for funds, etc. Throughout this journey, how many of them evaluate the many ways they could really help with the healing process or find a new approach to healing or create a process which allows reaching out to greater numbers. Only those who break the barriers of given paths are able to create something new. Thankfully, there are many innovators today and even if some of their creations are fuelled by commercial or social reasons, they are doing so because they have chosen to shake free of defined paths and be on the road less travelled.
No matter where we are in life, it is a good idea to check what limitations we are holding on to and see how they are stopping us from reaching out to the stars
“To be free, is to remove all limits of what things can or should be”. This is explained beautifully in the movie, The Matrix, where a small child bends a spoon through sheer mental power. “The secret is not to try and bend the spoon, but to focus on the thought that there is no spoon”, says the small child. Sounds easy, but the “realities of life, the practicality of expectations and realist approach to efforts”, all come in the way.
For instance, a client asked me, “what if I want to be the ‘King of England’, we all know that’s not possible?” Is that a limitation or is it being practical? It all depends on what a person means by being the King of England. Does the person want to be as famous, as rich and as influential then the answer is, “Yes, it is possible”. So the limitation was simply in the way the title of the ‘King of England’ was viewed.
In a nation, where a tea seller, Narendra Modi, made it to the post of the Prime Minister, we have a famous example of how our mind alone can imprison us with its limitations or free us to believe in any aspiration and receive it. And while referring to Modi, one can aptly quote his answer when he was asked, if he had always wanted to become the Prime Minister? To which he replied, “I never aspired to become something, but I always aspired to do something.”
No matter where we are in life, it is a good idea to check what limitations we are holding on to and see how they are stopping us from reaching out to the stars. There are many sources, telling us why we can’t. Let us seek that source within us, which says we can.