I met this boy. A boy who told me something; something that shook up everything that I had grown up to believe and understand. He told me that college wasn’t for him. Before this point, I had never considered college to be a choice, or an option. I had been raised thinking that going to a university was just what you did. But this boy, named Joe, disagreed. He told me that he planned on becoming a musician. When it came to his future goals, I was pessimistic, doubtful, and smug. But by the end of the year, he was on tour with his band. Granted, he was only in the opening act. Granted, he didn’t exactly make it big. But he made it. And I was in awe. The thing about Joe was that he wasn’t looking for approval when it came to his dreams.
Joe became synonymous with unconventional job selections. By the time he was 19, he had not only had a brief music career, but he had also acted as the chef in an Italian restaurant, and as a worker in a lumberyard. He graduated from high school and heard about a job in Alaska, of all places. He decided that he was going to spend the winter working as a deckhand on crab fishing boat. Naturally, I thought he was crazy. Naturally, it didn’t matter what I thought.
His choices made me look at my own. They made me recognize that there isn’t a set formula for life. Everyone can make their own decisions, their own plans, and their own dreams, because in the end, it’s their own life.
Joe never came back after from that trip. There was an accident, and he died.
This ending was hard to accept. However, the message is still same. Joe will forever be a boy who taught me to believe in dreams and what it means to make your own choices. To defiantly seek out life and fulfillment in your own way because in the end, it is better to have lived and die then never know what it means to be concretely in possession of your own life.
