The Furniture of Life

“Is this really worth the $8.25 an hour?” I thought to myself, as the sun was glaring down on my already sweaty body. You see, I was trying to move a very large reclining sofa (which weighs about 400lbs) through the very small door of a college frat house near the university in my area. As I was pushing, pulling, and actually losing more ground than I was making; I began to think to myself “what am I doing here?” Not what I was doing trying to go against the laws of physics by passing a larger object through a smaller one, but more along the lines of what am I doing here in my life? How is being a furniture deliveryman going to benefit me in the long run? With this simple thought, I remembered what I wanted out of life, and how I was going to get it.

Being at the stage in my life where I am in between school periods (high school and college) I had lost contact with the direction I want to take in my life. As I was standing there (after having given up trying to get the sofa through the door) I saw the particular situation that I was standing in a new light. You could say that the sofa represented my life(Indeed I was the sofa in this particular parable). The doorway was the sum total of all the challenges that I would have to overcome in order to achieve my goal, which in this case was the living room. In order to attain one’s goals, one must work, sweat, cry, and bleed to get there. As the great philosopher Boromir (think LOTR) once said, “ One does not simply walk into Mordor”; we have to fight our way to our goals; it is not a cake walk that we can take lightly. For who is a man that achieves without sacrificing (unless his rich uncle left him his entire inheritance)? Would it be worth it when we arrived at our destination, and held the cup of victory if there was no sacrifice involved in getting there? Of course not!

I myself want more than the world to be a doctor one day. I know how hard the road will be, but I cannot see myself doing anything other then helping people. As I prepare for pre-med school to start at the end of the summer, I am gearing up as much as possible for the hardships in which I will have to endue. We, as a people have to take charge of our lives, and sometimes we have to do the impossible, like getting the sofa into the house. We (I and my co-worker) were eventually able to get that sofa into the living room, but only after we took a step back, analyzed the problem, and found a solution (which was taking the door off its hinges to gain the extra 1” that we needed). Then, only after much more work, we finally made it to our goal. So in other words, get ready to work you pants off* for that which you desire to have, but don’t worry; it will be worth it in the end.

**On a side note, if any of you know of a single, attractive female between the ages of 18-23, please let me know.