We paused, locked in a state of contemplative confusion as our eyes and hearts refused to allow the other to veer off to a side road. It felt as if breathing might break us from some imminent discovery. Finally he glanced upwards, as I sat back in the grass for a mere moment and caught the tail end of a shooting star. We let out a snicker-sigh as he remarked, “Oh…yea.”
We had been discussing our purpose, our role, our reason in this world. Our expectations and our assumptions for who we were responsible to become and how we really planned to achieve such voracious goals.
I wondered aloud whether we were the ones to take up such causes as putting roofs over survivor’s heads, bringing fair wages to farmer’s hands, empowering our youth to become independent individuals. We, who had been blessed from day one, who had been given all the opportunities and all the choices to take our lives in whichever direction we chose. We, who survived tragedies of our own, at magnitudes of our own making, paling in comparison to those who we hoped to affect. We, who had enough access to knowledge to learn how to take our own lives into our hands, empower ourselves, make our ideas fly. We, who had arrived at this abandoned home in this earthly place with the mission of moving our dreams from elusive hopes to tangible realities.
The overwhelming levels of depth and humanity hit me so hard I found myself in tears. I broke down at the thought of such hope and idealism encapsulated into a new family of entangled souls, bound by the sole desire to make a difference, but that may be thwarted if we did not go about it in the right way. If we didn’t take the right steps or if we missed the golden opportunities, our dreams might slip away.
Recently, though, a realization swept over me. What we are here for, what makes us the unreasonable youth of our world, is not simply and plainly to make the ideas we have today into Gandhian movements tomorrow. What we are here for is to unravel how we might attempt to accomplish that task over time, over a plethora of ideas, over a vast expanse of opportunities and a diverse set of people who are relying on us to capitalize upon our luck, our notes, our dreams, to help them realize their own.
What I walk away with, as I pull my bags over my shoulder and embark upon a new idea, an immaterialized dream, is how drastically my life has changed. How deeply I have been moved. How seriously I have rediscovered my path in a short time. How much respect and awe I hold towards my new brothers and sisters who will change the world we live in today.
When I look back upon the memories of this moment in time, stare up at the stars we put in the sky as our ideas took flight, I imagine myself to be left laughing in bliss of how unbelievably, unrealistically, beautifully idealistic we once were. And how we still are.