What Do You Want?

A bumper sticker on a Colorado-tagged car recently caught my attention. It's not a new sticker, based on a quick internet search, but as they say, it was new to me. It read:

Remember who you wanted to be

As you can see, there's no punctuation mark, leaving a gaggle of questions in my mind:

Was it a command with an implied period or exclamation point? Should I have stopped at that moment in the middle of the road until I had fully envisioned past dreams of life?

Or was there an implied question mark: Was it a rhetorical invitation to think back on who I envisioned as I gazed into the future in yesterday's mirrors? Another alternative was to take it as a simple yes/no question—which of course I could only have answered as "yes and no." I'll consider it here as a directive to remember who we wanted to be.

My internet search pulled up lots of blogs on the phrase, each mostly tried to recreate lists of what the writers wanted to do–professionally or experiences they wanted to have, etc. when they grew up. A few mentioned attributes they wanted to have. All in all, they were inspirational: sort of a recapturing the innocence of youth intermingled with craving a more simple life.

However, as I reflect on the blogs and the bumper sticker motto, I'm left with one question and one concern:

First, the concern: Why is it that a question about who we wanted to be mutates so often and quickly into what we wanted to do professionally. The culturally now-demanded charge that all good fathers and mothers must give particularly to their daughters: You can do whatever you want to do. You can be whatever you want to be—president, astronaut, etc. I suspect that in the end, it won't matter what we do for a living—a lawyer, a doctor, a famous personality, a firefighter, etc. The question we have to ask is never about what we do professionally or the fabulous (and necessarily unique) experiences we have. It will be more important what we did for others and who we were at our invisible-to-the-world core.

Now the question: Why is it that we accept as a given that a dream of who we wanted to be at age five, 10, 15, even 20 is inherently more valuable than and morally elevated above who we would want to be if we took stock today. We are, by nature and by our physical separation from others and other things, self-centered. At any age, it's difficult to see life without seeing ourselves at its center. But especially when we're young, it is a particularly daunting challenge to try to shift the center elsewhere—because we don't have the context of seeing and appreciating that there are other concerns greater than our own or greater than those in our immediate vicinity. If you had asked me when I was young who I wanted to be, I probably would have answered something about wanting to do good in the world, but it would have been through immature moral eyes that focused from the center of my universe—which was me. My answer would have come from a young boy or young man unconsciously apart from and innocently and naively ignorant of many parts of the community and world. And that separation from the world would have twisted self-perception, again innocently, into a personal feeling of world-class superiority in entitlement and capability.

It's nice to remember the dreams of who we wanted to be as a young people, but they were incomplete, and to return to them unaltered seems a perhaps silly exercise. Better to consider where we want to take our lives now that we have a bit more experience, a bit more compassion, and are hopefully a bit less self-centered.

I'm thinking of printing up a slew of bumper stickers that read:

Think who you want to be!

The slogan will call for a bit of contemplation—which is an important part of the charge, but it also will get us to better dreams and, hopefully, better realities. But the contemplation is only the beginning: This past week, I happened to glance at my highlighted copy of Dr. M. Scott Peck's remarkable book, The Road Less Traveled, and one underlined sentence caught my eye as perfectly describing the next step: "The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action." We must work to make sure that who we are and become flows naturally and authentically from us in action.