What Do You Want to Be?

Throughout our lives we get to be many things. Some just “happen” to us, and some of those may be pretty unpleasant. Others are created by us.

Mar 17

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Who hasn’t been asked that question, probably several times during our lives? But there’s an assumption built into the question; that you want to and actually do “grow up.”

My father managed to stay a “kid” until the day he died. He loved getting home from work and coming out to play dodge ball and ring-o-levee-o with me and my friends. He saw the fun in everything and did his best to share it with everyone he encountered. The memories are so clear in my memory, as is my certainty that Dad had long ago made a conscious decision to not “grow up.”

We Get to “Be” Many Things in Many Categories

When you think about it, we are born to “be” several things from our beginning. We’re born to a mother which assigns us to be that mother’s child, and her partner’s child as well. DNA determines whether we’ll be white or black or brown or red or yellow. We may be their brown-eyed girl, or their blue-eyed boy, or other. Soon we get to be a “fussy” baby, or a wonder child who soon sleeps through the night. Later on we may get to be tall, or short. We get to be all these things with absolutely no effort on our part at all. Hint: your parents most probably just want you to be a healthy, happy baby.

Education

As we pursue our education, we get to be in nursery school, then a kindergartner, then a schoolkid. As we grow into our teens we get to be high-schoolers, and some become college students, graduates, masters, professors, doctors or other.

Profession

Beyond choice of college, here is the first “be” requiring us to make a decision. What do we want to be (now that we’ve ‘grown up’?) to help you earn a living.

Here, the choices of profession are downright multitudinous. You may choose to be a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief, a craftsman, a plumber, a waiter or waitress, a coal miner, a consultant (resultant?), a freelancer, an accountant, a teacher, a builder, an architect, and the list goes on and on.

How do we decide what we will be professionally?

Sometimes we just fall into a decision. As a young person we get ourselves a job in a retail establishment, fast-food or other restaurant, retail floor salesperson, stockroom clerk, some kind of assistant, or many others. As the years go by we keep growing in that company and, when we reach adulthood, remain in that company. Sometimes for the rest of our lives!

Sometimes we allow the decision made to be made for us. A family member or good family friend approaches you to come work for them, promising they’ll teach you to be great in their business. You accept the offer and one of two things usually happens. Either they make good on their promise and you continue to grow and prosper in that company, or it just doesn’t work out and you move on.

Another way in which someone other than you decides what you’re going to be may happen during a period of required conscription. You get drafted into the Armed Forces. There, you are evaluated and assigned to specific roles that someone else decided upon. This too has the potential to work out very well, as you learn to be an engineer, or a materials manager, or an FBI, CIA, or Secret Service agent, or one of many leadership positions in various industries. Military Service has been a powerful path to becoming what you ultimately decide to be.

Demanding, hard-nosed parents may pressure you to be anything they want you to be, perhaps the same profession they have participated in. Perhaps a profession associated with high income.

Then there are the driven few who seem to know from childhood what they want to be when they grow up. Some are musical savants who just sit down at a piano and start playing beautifully. Others develop an early love for a science, or a sport, or dance, or music, or technology, or one of so many others. My second-grade teacher, Helen Ogden, detected a potential in me and lit the fire in me for the written word. I’ve known since I was eight years old that I’m a writer. I distracted myself, taking time out to be several other things in the technology world, but ultimately I was drawn back to writing. It’s not just a part of you, it is you.

Citizenship – Being a Person

There are even several ways in which we get to be a citizen.

We’re proud to be an American, or other nationality. We’re a citizen of our state, our county, our city, even our neighborhood. Those are dependent upon where we decide to live.

But then there’s citizenship in the context of being a human being.

Have you ever watched the news and wonder how some people can be as careless as they were leaving a child in a hot car? Driving the wrong way on the highway? Robbing a bank? Ending someone else’s life in any of the many ways people choose to. That person got to be a mass-murderer.

How could they “be” like that?

Some people decide to be evil. It may not even be a conscious decision. It may just arise out of what they learn and experience in childhood. It may be their response to a specific trauma that makes them vengeful. It may be the result of peer-pressure from falling in with the wrong crowd.

For some, it is the result of an illness or a medical condition of the person’s mind that causes them to be a sociopath, or a psychopath.

What may not occur to many people is that we each have the opportunity to choose to be good or evil. To be courageous or retreating, to be outspoken or quiet, to be a leader or a follower. Just as the brilliant author Viktor Frankl showed us in his seminal work, Man’s Search for Meaning, we always retain our ability to choose our response to any situation. Similarly, we get to choose to be peaceful or aggressive, sensitive or cold, demanding or accepting, angry or pleased, understanding or dismissive, even happy or sad. Yes, if Frankl could be encouraging to others even as he suffered in the concentration camps, we can choose to be happy, to be calm, to be positive even when confronted with the most negative of situations.

Relationships

We also have so many relationships in the course of our lives. Relationships with friends, with family, with strangers, with officials, with various groups, with the religion we’ve chosen or defaulted to be. With lovers

Some have deep relationships with inanimate objects and concepts. We love being a member of the human race or some smaller segment of that. We love to be a New Yorker, or a Chicagoan, a Californian, an Italian, a Jew, a Mormon. We love to be who we are, where we are, what we are.

Many have an abiding relationship with their pets. Bless anyone who gives an animal a forever home.

Then there are musicians who bond with their instrument. Even though they can afford to own dozens of guitars, there’s one they’ve been playing for a long time that has just become invaluable. You’ll often see top musicians playing a beat-up, old guitar. And probably extraordinarily well!

Within each of these kinds of relationships, and many more, we can “be” in many subjective ways.

We can be understanding with our children or our spouse. We can be short-tempered. We can be reasonable or unreasonable. We can be downright hostile. We can be welcoming, or close our personal doors to certain others. We can be consoling and close, or distant and disinterested.

We can be warm or cold.

The sometimes hidden reality is that each of these are choices. You may think you get angry as a reaction to something someone did, but the reality is that you choose to be angry. You choose to be condemning and unaccepting. You can also choose, however, to be constructive. You can actively choose to be compassionate and explain your displeasure to the offender. Help them understand how you feel and why you feel that way. Talk it out calmly.

While we sometimes get to be actively, loudly angry, we have chosen to be that way and we can choose to resist that temptation and instead use the situation as a learning opportunity. It’s not easy, but with time and practice it can be done, and be very, very rewarding.

Self

We have a very special relationship with ourselves, and we get to choose every aspect of it.

We may be fit or fat. We may be healthy or not, controlled in part by our choice of foods and time spent exercising. We may be well-groomed or not. We may be our own definition of attractive. These are all decisions we get to make, and our general attitude is a product of those choices.

We may be objective about ourselves and work to constantly improve, or we may be completely disinterested in our general condition and just drift through life.

Some want to be wealthy. For others, material wealth is immaterial, or at least less important. Those who want to be clergy commit to a life of poverty. Many people are pleased to be “comfortable,” making enough income to maintain what is to them an enjoyable lifestyle.

There are those for whom the most important thing to be is successful. But what does that mean?

The popular, obvious definition of being successful is to have plenty of money, plenty of friends, a position of power or influence, drive high-powered luxury vehicles (or have them driven for us), live in a magnificent home in an exclusive neighborhood, and enjoy the deference of many people around them.

For others, the highest priority is to be proud. Proud of what they’ve done. Proud of what they’ve accomplished. Proud of what they’ve contributed to the world around them. Proud of what they’ve done for those they love. This is not restricted to clergy, as some might assume. The only requirement for being proud is to do something or things that you can be proud of.

Perhaps the hardest thing to manage in our relationship with our self is to accept that we are not born to be perfect. That’s something none of us will ever be. Failing to focus on this may lead us to be many things we never wanted to be. Angry. Jealous or envious of others. Hostile. Cold. Short-tempered. Insensitive to the needs of others. Disappointed.

Maybe the most important thing to be is conscious and accepting of the short-comings or failures we are inevitably going to experience. We’ll never be perfect. We were never designed or built to be perfect, if we even know what that means. But nothing stops us from aspiring to be perfect, as long as we can be satisfied and truly accepting of falling short to being excellent, or at least good.

What Do You Want?