“I dreamed about you last night,” I told my friend over the phone while I was in the bus enroute to work this morning. I narrated the latest in my bizarre string of dreams set in my hometown. “Your bestfriend was there too, and he was wearing a suit with pink trim. It kinda looked like Ron Weasley’s dress robes in the fourth Harry Potter movie.”
“Umm… I don’t know who that is,” he confessed.
“Ron Weasley is Harry Potter’s bestfriend,” I explained. “Maybe you were supposed to be Harry Potter in my dream.”
“I sure wish I could fly like Harry Potter,” he responded with a laugh.
Since I was talking to him already, I remembered to ask him about something that he had told me about weeks ago but got too busy to follow up about. “So are you really going home to the Philippines?” My friend was currently living the OFW dream in Dubai, at least when he wasn’t busy jetting off all over the world as a flight attendant.
“Yes. I’m going home on the 9th,” he said.
“Then what do you plan to do there?” I asked. “Business? Work still?”
“Fly,” was his unexpected response. “Like Harry Potter.”
“Crazy!” I laughed in reply.
“I really am. I’m not joking,” he said. That’s when I realized what he meant. And how serious he really was.
“You mean… as a pilot?” I gasped.
“That’s the plan,” he confirmed.
“Wow. So you’re gonna study again?” I was picking my jaw up off the floor at the enormity of what he was telling me.
“Yes. Actually what I’m doing is really scary,” he confided. “But it’s just something that I need to do. I don’t want to have regrets about this later.”
His words jabbed at my chest. I understood him completely. I had known him long enough to be privy to his childhood dream, and to the knowledge that he had actually first enrolled in said course back in college before he had to shift to another one when his family could no longer afford it.
“I know what you mean,” I told him. “I am proud of you for going after your dreams.”
“I told myself, if I don’t become a pilot at the age of thirty, then I’ll never become one ever,” he went on. “So I need to do this now. I’m thinking that if I failed (hopefully not), then at least I would still have time to recover.”
“Sounds like a good plan with mitigated risk and a fallback measure,” I said approvingly.
“But the thing is, this will cost me,” he said. “My five years of earning will be put to naught. And even if I did succeed at this, I may not earn as much as I do now.”
And because I am me, my response to that was a song: “It’s not about the money money money… I don’t care about the money money money… I just wanna make the world dance, forget about the price tag…”
And because he knew me, he laughed and said, “I knew that song was gonna run through your head!”
But I really did mean what I said – that I was proud of him, and the lyrics of the song too. It really isn’t always about the money. It depends on what your dreams are.
Fly high, my friend! (I wish I had your guts.)
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