Summer Dreams

In my childhood days, I had a 2-month summer holiday from school in July and August each year. I would sleep over in my aunt’s house for a few weeks as I could play with my cousins who were around my age. My aunt lived in a district with a lot of old buildings. We always found something to play every day – tracing each other through the alleys between buildings, wandering around the toy shops, watching movies in the cinemas, eating in the food stalls. Some days we might not like to go out, we simply relaxed and enjoyed the laziness at my aunt’s home, reading comics and having ice cream. One of my favorite games was flying paper planes on top of the building. Watching those paper planes flew over other buildings and the streets below, I felt a sense of freedom. I started dreaming of becoming an airplane pilot when I grow up.

Paper plane paper plane
How soft and light you are
Hope to ride you in the air
Up to the high clouds fair
And reach abode of heavenly realm

Paper plane paper plane
How soft and light you are
Gracefully flying your wings’ pair
Look as if to a land rare
Yet, you are always there
Mission is what this plane bears

So let this paper plane
Lightly tapping one’s sorrowed heart
Carrying away all despairs

My father also brought me to the beach during the summer holiday. We rent a huge rubber life ring, used it to keep us afloat in surfing the waves. We yelled as the waves lifted us up and shot us down like a roller coaster. It was the time I learned how to swim. Occasionally we rent a boat and paddled to the other side of the beach for fishing. The bigger fishes caught would be cooked as dishes for dinner and the small ones would be boiled for soup. But sometimes we spent the whole afternoon and caught nothing. Looking at the far away horizon where the sky and the sea meet, the breeze with the smell of salt water, I felt afloat and free. I thought I might become a sailor when I grow up.

I am sailing, I am sailing
Home again cross the sea
I am sailing, stormy waters
To be near you, to be free

I am flying, I am flying
Like a bird cross the sky
I am flying, passing high clouds
To be with you, to be free

Can you hear me, can you hear me
Thro the dark night, far away
I am dying, forever trying
To be with you, who can say

We are sailing, we are sailing
Home again cross the sea
We are sailing stormy waters
To be near you, to be free

Nowadays, my aunt’s district is rebuilt with high-rise buildings and shopping malls. I don’t look at the world from a child’s perspective any more. And I didn’t become a pilot or a sailor. On the contrary, I work indoor in a cubicle from nine to five every day. When we grow up, we understand that adulthood is just a sad acknowledgement of failed childhood dreams and life is about compromise. However, my nomadic dreams were somehow fulfilled to some degree in my wandering life: a childhood in Hong Kong, studying abroad in U.K., traveling around Europe, migrating to Australia, then some business trips to U.S. The people I met, those adventures and experiences become a bittersweet celebration of my ordinary life. To live is to travel – keep moving and do what you want to do. Adulthood is not necessarily attractive, but you can still live fully and experience everything.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
– Mark Twain

Poem: “Paper Plane” – Author Unknown
Lyrics: “Sailing” – Rod Stewart