Kindergarten dreams

I was watching part of the movie Mr. Deeds yesterday while sitting up in bed after being transferred from the recovery room to my private room and then it hit me. Deeds was right. The more we grow up, the more we begin to lose it.

I’m not talking about baby fat. I’m talking about heart. 

There was a portion of the movie when Deeds arrived just in the nick of time to take over the podium in the attempt to convince for the last time, the investors and stockholders not to chop up the company and fire hundreds of employees in a snap. Hi speech was short, simple, and sensible because it hit everyone else on the bull’s eye and it kinda made me step back and see the bigger picture of how our dreams and priorities begin to change over time.

I’ve started to sincerely believe that all of us are naturally good and that all of us have been born with that save-the-world gene that eventually dies out as we grow older. I mean, when we were five or six years old and someone asked us what we wanted to be when we grow up, our answers are enough to make the whole world go ‘awww….’

I remember back in kindergarten when we had our career day and one of my best friends told our teacher that she wanted to be a nurse because she wanted to heal all the poor people who are sick. Another classmate said that he wanted to be a scientist because he wanted to come up with an invention that will make the world a happier place. Many wanted to be firemen or policemen because they wanted to bust crooks and beat the bad guys. Of course, there were those who wanted to be engineers and doctors, ballet dancers, and actors just because they wanted to make the world a better place to live in.

More than ten years after, it’s weird how many of us have forgotten our dreams and fell into one compromise after the other. None of my kindergarten friends became teachers because eventually, they found out that the lifestyle that comes with being a public school teacher could not buy them a designer bag every month. Many of my batch mates opted for more lucrative jobs that made them more miserable than happy. Many more are jumping from one job to another.

It’s crazy how our dreams and ambitions change all because of money. It’s a small thing that can shape our decisions—only if we let it. Money per se is not a bad thing. But it should never define us or our lives. The more we make money our lord, the more we become miserable and discontent and the more we start to lose important people in our lives. At the end of the day, we may have that posh pad or that Porsche but because we’ve become so caught up with it, we may not have noticed that along the way to achieving our material dreams, we’ve made the people we wanted to save when we were six suffer because we robbed them of a potential hero.

I know I’ll forever miss kindergarten because the world back then was so simple and decisions didn’t have to take money into consideration.