Do I lack ambition?

As a kid, I wanted to be a ballerina. In church yesterday I talked to a friend who actually is a ballerina, champion and all, contract with a dance company. Despite my knowledge now that the work behind any ballet (the aches, the missing toenails, the bloodied heels) is arduous, and a far cry from the lissome grace we witness on stage ... I was still somewhat wistful.

I don't quite recall what else I wanted to be, but when I did write poetry, I had wanted to be a poet, oblivious of course to the fact that every one and his mother writes poems, albeit very bad ones, like myself. As a 15 year old my genius-y mentor (First Singaporean President of the Oxford Poetry Society! First Class Honours in English From Oxford!) said I wrote better than he did as a teenager. Obviously, he was lying to make me feel better. Whatever promise I had back then, of course, has now been completely quashed (QUASHED, not squashed. I like the word, but I'm not sure if it exists) by my utter lack of inspiration and real writing. I wrote a poem the other day, and as I composed it in my head it thrilled me. It wasn't very good, however, somehow the sentiment I was after eluded me. I stumble over my words.

At my cousin's wedding I met people on their way to university, or who had just finished, or who were working. Everyone seems to have gotten by. The supposed academic failures are going to do their post-graduate degrees with a clear sense of their career path upon graduation, everybody's going to some ColumbiaHarvardYaleStanford place. People look at me pointedly when I tell them I want to study the humanities, and ask me "And then what will you do?". As they stare at me expectantly I say " I don't really know. I would just like to read and write a lot." In the back of their minds, I can see their interest already fading. I wonder if I have already failed in their eyes.

I never really harboured dreams of becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an architect, things kids in kindergarten said they wished to be, no doubt unable to even spell their supposed future professions correctly. I have lived very little, and all I really want to say is everything I do is an attempt to get back to the moment where I am consumed by something before me. All I want to be is in the moment. The faltering of my heart in front of that fallen tree and those countryside plains, the quickening of my breath when I begin memorizing that quote or poem that I just fell in love with, the deep exhalation as I sink into my chair, satisfied with some photograph, some book, some memory. The pause when everything inside you collapses in a small, imperceptible way, but enough to create some kind of paradigm shift in your understanding of what surrounds you. Everything is an attempt to become deeply involved with a world that perplexes, frustrates and bewilders me, to penetrate its greater mystery. That is all, really.

Perhaps it is not that I lack ambition altogether. Perhaps I only lack certain kinds of ambition.