Air-Castles

When I was small I was ambitious. I was going to do...anything, everything. I would write! paint! sing! act! do! and give no thought to the possibility of prevention or failure.

Then I started to try to lay the brick-and-mortar versions of the castles in my head, and found that I am not much of a carpenter.

I used to think I wanted to be a poet, like Tennyson, or Keats, or Dickinson, or Yeats, but I can't. Some things, you either got it or you don't.

And I used to think I would be a famous singer, and have concerts, and make CD's, and win awards, and now I feel sure I won't. Some things, you don't want them as much as you thought you did.

Once I was going to be an artist, and live far away (from where, I never knew or tried to know), and paint things as I saw them, and then I saw that I couldn't paint. Some things were never yours to begin with.

This morning I was going to get up early and be productive, but I slept instead. Some things, you never really wanted anyway.

Perhaps I am just as ambitious now as I ever was--no, I know I am--but the ambition is different. It is ambitious to get up every morning and try to draw breath. It is ambitious to put one foot in front of the other, and assume that your feet will propel you. It is ambitious to open your eyes and expect to see. In that sense I am frightfully ambitious. But ambition for what you cannot do, and are not built to do, and were never meant to do, translates as stupidity in the form of stubborness.

This is not to say I have no dreams or faith in my abilities. I do not mean to say that there is probably nothing for me in the future, or that I cannot do anything worthwhile. Far from it. I have plans, too, not the grandiose ones of childhood, but to me as alluring as ever a dream of fame was. I do not belittle my former air-castles, but I have moved out of them. Large as they were, they cramped me.