The Optimist vs. the Realist

Excuse the collee talk, but as the deadlines approach thoughts about the future are all that will fuel my head :)

From: here

The pessimist in me has always made what will happen one day a very scary thought indeed. I’ve been toying with the idea of just drifting across the world, learning, observing and writing, and just earning my way through it all. It’s a romantic proposal, and, according to my parents, “impractical,” but I know it too; my life isn’t a Hollywood movie, I’m not going to go on an observer’s voyage; I’m not going to soak in, and learn about the world by actually experiencing it. I’m not going to have an epiphany mid-thought. At least, not yet.
                 I will go to college, and a heavy debt will befall me. It will hang in the air around me, wherever I go: a huge ominous sign in red - “$100,000 DUE”. My degree would hang next to it - in hopes that the dazzling nature of this piece of paper would distract attention from that menacing stain of red so close by. I will have a tangible proof of my resourcefulness, and some useful experience, and I may even have a job. I will work, and live. I will experience, and learn, but running at the back of my mind, would always be those words - $100,000 due.

               One day I will open an old high school journal, or maybe I’ll find this. I will laugh at my resolve to travel the world, and then, maybe, my eyes will fill with tears. I’ll think of how it had been a laughable idea, but also a well-loved one. I’ll daydream of quitting my job, and traveling out into the sun set, the perfect lighting making my skin glow.

But the optimist (whom I had to drag out from the shadows) suggests that maybe I will go to college, and it will be like travelling the world.
           I might get a college degree after four fondly remembered years, and pay back my student loans with a smile of remembrance. I might value the education that money actually got me.
           Maybe one day I will remember my high school dreams, and I might smile. Maybe I’ll smile at my naivete; at my belief that watching the world was the only way to learn, and that far off places are the best to observe. I’ll have something wiser to say then. Maybe by then I would have learnt not to regret. I might know something then that I don’t know of now.