My Lifelong Goals

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” –Marcus Aurelius

Getting this blog up and running has allowed me to put my lifelong goals and dreams into perspective. This site is helping me work towards one of them: becoming a published author. While that goal/dream is coming into focus, I’ve found myself recently reflecting on some of the other things I set out to accomplish once I reached stability back in the early 2000s.

After I met my wife in 2008, a few goals became important. One was to start a healthy and thriving family, and after we married in 2009 and had twins in 2013, that goal has come to fruition, even though raising a family and fulfilling my role as a loving husband and father is a work in progress as well as a joy each and every day. Also at the time I met my wife, another goal presented itself since I would have had a hard time getting married and having a family on the salary of a part-time, freelance, newspaper writer. So I went back to school to get a teaching degree.

But while teaching has truly been a labor of love, I set out to teach high school English from the start. Following a year of teaching sophomore composition in the city, however, a position opened up at my former junior high, and staring down a job that would effectively double my salary and allow us to move to the suburbs where we grew up, I couldn’t pass it up.

So here I am, almost a decade later, and still teaching at the same middle school. Don’t get me wrong, middle school students are tons of fun in their own right, and there are many extremely rewarding aspects of teaching young adolescents during a very exciting and tumultuous time in their lives. But I still hold up my time at the middle school with my one year of high school teaching, and they don’t really compare.

My final objective of being a high school English teacher has gone mostly unfulfilled. I’m still looking into getting my foot in the door at a high school in the area, but it is very competitive, and after numerous interviews the last two years, I have nothing to show for my efforts.

On the bright side, I am currently coaching two high school sports, so I do get the satisfaction of working with the older kids while maintaining my place in my middle school classroom. So overall, family: check; published author: pretty close; coaching at the high school level: check; teaching high school: remains to be seen…

If I live out my days having accomplished most of the above goals, I can’t complain. Like I’ve learned after struggling with depression and my own personal demons: better to live your life content about your accomplishments than lamenting over the things that have yet to be fulfilled.

I’m going to stay motivated and driven to teach at the high school level, at least for the next year or so, and if it doesn’t come to pass as I price myself out of high school teaching jobs because of my years of experience (it’s the only profession I know where experience can work against you), I’ll be okay with that. Both of my late grandmothers had a way of always looking on the brighter side of things, even through their battles with cancer and dementia, and at this time, I am channeling their eternal optimistic spirits and outlooks on life.