Both of my boys start college again this coming week, as young people are doing all over the country. Michael will be student teaching this fall, the final hurdle he has to jump before receiving his degree in Education in January.

He's going to be a secondary school social studies teacher. Will switched from an English major to Broadcast Journalism this past spring and has another year to go before he finishes.

 

I've talked to both of them recently about college and the future and, although I didn't specifically ask them, I wondered how much their career decisions were influenced by other people, including their mom and me, and how much of it really came from inside them.

Kids start getting asked at very early ages what they want to be when they grow up which requires them to start thinking about answers to those questions. I've probably been just as guilty as the next person in asking that question as well.

 

But maybe we've been asking the wrong question. Maybe all this time we should have been asking "who do you want to be" instead of "what do you want to be" because for many people, they're entirely different things. Some of us love the professions and jobs we're in so much that it's very difficult to divorce these two concepts.

I've loved teaching since the very first day I walked in a classroom and realized that I would play a role in the future of every student that ever took a class with me. That was an awesome realization and one of the most significant moments in my life.

So teaching (what I do) is part and parcel of who I am.

 

Many people, unfortunately, don't have a job they love to go to every day. Their job is not who they are.

There are people who live to work and others that work to live and if you have a "job" rather than an occupation, a profession, or even a calling, it's much easier to divorce what you do from who you are.

 

But it seems the "who we are" is ultimately so much more important than "what we do."

Our life's work, for the most part, is outside of us while who we are lives in the inner recesses of our souls and influences our every thought and action.

Do we do good deeds or bad deeds, do we build up or tear down, do we create or destroy, are we truthful and honest or do we lie, do we put others first or ourselves, do we give as a gift or give expecting a return, do we praise people or demean them, are we faithful to a person, a cause or a belief or do we blow in the wind, can we keep a secret or are we gossips, are we altruistic or self-centered, are we admired or despised?

The list of questions can go on and on but at the center of all these questions is the answer of who we are.

 

So perhaps we've been asking young people the wrong question all these years.

Maybe instead of asking our children and our neighbor's children what they're going to do when they grow up, we ought to be asking who they're going to be instead.

 

Because who we are is what really defines us, our upbringing, our socialization and our place in the world.

 

And it's how we'll all be remembered.