Lately, I've found the 1960's Rolling Stones lyrics "no you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need" going through my head. What was once a fun song to sing along to as my parents drove me somewhere, has become a constant, reoccurring question of mine:
When is it okay to settle?
As children, we dream of being astronauts, doctors firemen, police officers, pilots. But what happens when life gets in the way and you find out you can't get through chemistry, no matter how many hours you study? Or that even though being a pilot or astronaut sounds like fun, you have a crippling fear of heights. Or that running through fire or gunpowder turns out to not be your thing. Or even worse, what happens when you find out that you genuinely and completely love English and can't see yourself majoring in anything else?
Yikes, what happens then?
What happens? You spend four years immersed in the written words of Chaucer and Poe. You're swept away by the passion of Hawthorne, the practicability (or sometimes not) of Thoreau. You pity the engineers, so literal, missing out on all of the wonders and beauty that can come from words instead of numbers.
But once that is over, you become practical. Unless you are going to be a teacher (the question that never seems to cease if you've majored in history, english or psychology) or you have the good fortune of becoming a famous novelist, you may as well sign your own name to the unemployment list.
Once any old job comes along, do you take it? When does it become time to say I have enough to be taken care of and that should be enough.
When have you reached the fine line between striving and thriving?
As an English major and literature nerd at heart, I have always thought passion comes before all else. But in present day, is that still the case? Maybe that's why all the people I considered magnificent, even geniuses in my lit. classes remained almost penniless throughout their lives. Because they chose passion over all else.
I find myself wanting more. More passion, more opportunities, a higher position. Traits that would have made me determined or driven in a sport seem more like greed and irrationality now that I am in the working world.
We tell ourselves to dream big, the proverbial "reach for the stars"! But when is enough, just...enough?
So the question remains: do we listen to our once 6-year-old self and follow our dreams? Or do we follow Mick Jagger's words, settle, and merely "take what we need" and move on?
