The Goof

Being young strengthens you and causes the energy to burst forth in you but being young also makes you feel invisible especially when you flunk or do not meet up to a certain set standard. Every now and then, we all get a bit of that failure in big or small packages at different levels of our lives. Failure does not respect anyone, irrespective of how intelligent one is, if you are not conscientious and fail to apply yourself appropriately, failure is inevitable.

Barrack Obama , US senator, who is passionately flagging the Democratic Presidential hopeful, during one of his campaign visits to Manchester Central High School, revealed that some aspect of his life as a youngster did not actually turn out to be a straight “T” as most people will like to think. “You know, I made some bad decisions that I’ve actually written about…I got into drinking, I experimented with drugs” he said. “There was a whole stretch of time that I didn’t really apply myself a lot!” Even though he did well in school, it was not until he got out that he realized he has wasted a lot of time on frivolities.

Well, that was the youth in Senator Obama in retrospect. How about you? Are you ready to give up on the “Goofer dust” (Cocaine) or will you rather give up your dreams? Maybe, the drug thing is not an issue for you but other weaknesses in academics, relationship with parents/peers or achieving your set goals, it does not matter how far you have failed, learning from that experience and focusing on your strengths is a positive way of expressing yourself. It is easy to sometimes think there is still time because we are young, however, goofing around now will only fill us with later regrets.

Many adults look at today’s young person with admiration/envy because we have a lot of things at our disposal that they never had at our age- technology advancement, good education etc. However, they also cringe in disgust each time they see a youth wasting such opportunities that would have improved their lives in many ways than one! At this juncture, I will like to implore every adult out there not to write-off any young person for goofing around, perhaps it is because he or she does not know better. It will be great if there is a better youth-adult relationship in our society to facilitate an effective mentoring structure that will guide us youths from wasting away and make positive contributions now and in the future- after all, Sen. Obama turned out better than some expected.