Doors swing open, doors slam shut

One of the best things parents do for their children from the day that they're born is to lie to them. Regardless of race, age, social status, region or religion, almost every child with a parent present is told the same thing, "You can be anything you want to be."

We're all adults here, we know that sadly isn't the case. It's still one of the greatest things that a parent does for their child.

We get older, we find that we're just not suited for some of the jobs we want. Most obviously, you can work as hard as you want, but if you're five feet tall, you're never going to be the starting center for the Knicks. Now that Zeke is gone, you've also lost your shot at backup as well.

Life is full of smaller hurdles as well. Perhaps you really want to write the Great American Novel, but you can't keep thoughts in your head long enough to get a solid start on it. Maybe you'd love to be a high-powered Hollywood agent, but can't wrap your mind around numbers.

The point is that from a very early age, there are plenty of things that stand in your way between what you want to do and what is realistically available to you.

I've swung wildly across this spectrum from my highly idealistic days as a college freshman, where I felt that my post as the Burke Hall vice president could certainly lead to a better world for my fellow man (one pizza party at a time, I suppose) to heated discussions in my mid-20s where I passionately argued the point that "most people just do whatever job sucks the least."

While we can't all be the cowboy/astronaut/ballerina/princesses we'd dreamed of being in kindergarten, I think that part of growing up is realizing that the time, effort and sometimes money required to get from Point A to Point B in our professional lives just isn't worth it for a lot of us.

We find apartments we like in cities we like and hopefully marry a person we like and that's enough to keep us happy. Sometimes, we buy dogs. We're not drones and most of us settle out into areas that we enjoy on multiple levels, but if you were to sit down and sketch your top five careers you'd choose if the aforementioned time/money/skills, would the title on your business card be there?

Mine wouldn't.

This stems from course reading I'm doing this week to prepare for Thursday night's class as I begin the second semester of my adult education career. I need to map out my custom-crafted major with an eye on some greater goal. That can be grad school, a new job or pretty much anything else I choose. I tend to think that if I was goal-oriented, I wouldn't be there in the first place, but I'll play along.

It's not like they have the Big Book of Awesome Jobs open in the main office and you go down and pick one out. It does take time and effort and a desire to fight and work towards that goal to get to a place where you're doing a job that you wouldn't trade for anything in the world.

That seems to be the piece most of us miss somewhere along the line. Again, sometimes the effort honestly isn't equal to the opportunity costs. Why trade on the time and money you could allocate other places unless it's really worth it?

This is a bigger issue as we get older. In addition to the investment up front, there's always the possibility that you emerge on the other side and can't find anyone to pay you for your newfound knowledge and skill set. It's one thing to get your business degree and use it to leverage a better position or paycheck with the same company, it's quite another to be dumped into the job market with people who weren't in kindergarten when you were in high school.

However, some people are willing to take those risks and do something dramatic to shake up their station in life. For them, I have nothing but respect. For someone like me who clings to routine and familiarity, I can't think of many things that are more terrifying that chucking everything and forging out on a new course.

While I think I have the requisite courage to make moderate course corrections on my career path, I can't fathom the stones it takes to decide you're tired of being a bank manager and enroll in clown college the next week.

Still, I've been pretty content today to pore through course materials and wonder about what can be. While I have the lion's share of coursework complete for an English degree, it's been a satisfying exercise to stretch my legs and wonder what it would be like to strike out in new directions, regardless of their practicality or earning potential.

If you think of your career path as a hallway, it's not outrageous to say that doors are constantly shutting for a variety of reasons. You need to pay for daycare and dozens of doors that would have been really fun to walk through close. Your friend goes nuts with her cell phone camera on a long night for you and the political doors close. Just getting older closes its share of doors.

It's been interesting to go and reopen dozens of them today. What major do you pick to be the head coach of an NFL team? I think I'd like to give that a run.

(Image from: LSSU.edu)