The Rising of a Star from the Ashes
The Olympics display some of the best amateur and professional athletes from around the world competing against each other. Most of these athletes are under the age of 26. Each of these athletes has worked hard to get to where they are today and have, at one point or another, been touted by observers and peers as a rising star. They had potential. They turned it into kinetic.
As I grow older, I feel more and more like I’ve failed. Watching the Olympics on television, I know that in some aspects, I have failed. I’ve never really been considered a rising star at anything I did and now, at the age of 26, there really isn’t much left that I could be considered a rising star for. If I was to be a star at anything I did, it would have to be now or the moment has already passed me by… a fleeting moment where someone may have thought that the ceiling was high for myself and that I’d be among the best.
Maybe there was once a time that I was touted as a rising star in academics but that day passed a long time ago. Engineering, academically-speaking, was a failure and my university was prepared to give up on me repeatedly. Only through perseverance did I manage to make it out of that crushing environment.
I was never physically gifted enough to be considered a rising star at the sports I played but I work hard and push myself to try to be more than I am. Alas, I’m now at an age where most start to decline unless they put in even more effort to improve. I have to make big, and perhaps even humongous, strides to be at a star’s level now and that’s rather unlikely.
With academics and athletics now out of the picture, I can only hope that my “rising star” status will come through my career. It’s all that I have left now for which I’m still young enough to establish myself at. I strive to improve as a person and as a Muslim each day but those are universal tenets of my faith that are absolute minimums to begin with.
I wish to be a rising star again…
