Impossible Lives.

Recently I finished a really, very good book "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells" I highly recommend it, I am stuck in the world now.  

There is something about it that reminds me of the good points of The "Time Traveler's Wife" with excellent writing, and great characters.
There is a scene at the beginning where the brother and sister are walking a dog and I think that the writer brings up the best question a philosopher can bring up.
The scene goes that a nasty woman yells at the couple for their dog, saying that they are ruining the neighborhood.  The brother is physically, noticeably ill, and the awful woman just gets nastier as the scene progresses.  The brother states that they will take the dog home but he has one question for the older, mean woman.

"When you were a little girl, madam," he said gesturing to her, "was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?"

I am sure that I have heard versions of this question before, and I know it is not an wholly original concept. But there is something about the book, and the scene that makes me come back to this question over and over.  Weeks after reading it.

I am hanging the question up on my reminder board by my computer.  I am contemplating this question.  It is possible that it is just the right question to hit me at the right time.  I am graduating after a long and hard road with a Bachelors in less than a month.  My world will be turned upside down.  Maybe if this was a normal, mundane time I would not find this question so appealing.  But today, this moment I do.

I believe that the people who need to be asked this question are those people who have boring, mundane, drudgery lives, and those people who are too busy to contemplate the question.  The next time you are in line at the supermarket and you want to scream at someone, the next time you are not as nice as you should be to your waitress.

Every moment of every day we need to ask ourselves.  Is this the person I wanted to become?

On that note the best commencement speech I have come across (even more so than the glorious Neil Gaiman one that you can get here, is one I recently heard from David Foster Wallace:  This Is Water.

It is up to me to be aware of myself, and sometimes it is appropriate to ask someone
"Sir, when you were a little boy; is this the man you wanted to become?"