You can have your cake, and eat it too


If you ask me what I want to do after high school, my normal answer would be to go to college, studying anything that isn’t math.  My halfway-joking answer would be to win the lottery. But the answer that I have told only a handful of people is much different. I’m not embarrassed by it, but it seems so improbable and impractical and just plain fanciful because what I really want to do is own a bakery.

How quaint.

When I say it like that, it sounds like nothing. I can bake brownies, decorate a cake, make a sandwich or two. What is the trouble? It’s only a bakery. It’s only a bakery that would require thousands to tens of thousands of start-up money, endless planning that could never be enough, and a pinch more courage than I have at the moment. Small businesses are not exactly known for stability—just look inside Vallco. There is a lot of risk for a minuscule chance of success. It just isn’t practical.

On the back burner
There are a few, a lucky few, who actually pursue what they have always wanted to be. Some children who played with toy stethoscopes become cardiologists. There is the quiet girl who eventually writes the novel she dreamt of since she was eight. Once in a while, a kid actually does grow up to be the President of the United States. And the rest of us work in cubicles. How many of us actually set out to do what we dream of? And how many of us will give up?

The reality is that being what we want doesn’t always correlate with being what is expected of us. Practicalities get in the way. For me, creating food is amazing–kneading dough with bare hands, baking until the smell of warm chocolate seeps into your clothes, watching someone take the first bite—but there is hardly a future in it. In fact, baking for a career sounds like something I would want if I lived in the 50s. I don’t even have the polka-dotted housewife dress or the June Cleaver-esque haircut for it.

Food for thought
Then again, is it even possible to give up on a dream in the first place? We may never realize them, but that does not mean we stop wanting them to come true. We can always fulfill them if we choose to in the future, even if we plan to do something else with our lives in the current moment.

A choice that we make as teenagers will not change the rest of our lives forever. Chances are that what happens now won’t mean diddly-squat in a year, and if the future is really that easy to alter can something as concrete as “giving up” exist? It might not be too late to become a ballerina or an astronaut (although I wouldn’t hold out on becoming a lottery winner).

There is a reason as to why we have dreams and why they don’t die easily. Even if I acknowledge that having a bakery is not in my future right now, the idea will always be sitting in the back of my head. Then someday as I am sitting in a cubicle, crunching numbers for my generic, easy-to-anger boss, a co-worker will bring in a platter of cookies his wife made and I will remember what makes this dream so worth it. A person will eat a cookie not because he needs to, but because he wants to. Dreams are like cookies, made fully of desire and baked at 350 degrees Fahrenheit over a lifetime, or until golden brown.