Achieving Your Dreams

Reaching the stars may not be as hard as you think. I managed to reach my stars and it wasn’t even by the path I planned it to be. The main thing you always have to be in order to reach your goals is to remain focused. Without focus your goal will not be as clear and you may stray from your path to achieving your goal.’, ‘When I was 13 years old my dad and I used to go boogie boarding in Lake Michigan. Naturally the main time of the year the waves would get big in Lake Michigan was in the fall when the water was 50 degrees or below. I used to read boogie-boarding magazines to see how people body boarded in California and Hawaii. One main person whom I mainly read about was Mike Stewart and how he boogie boarded in Hawaii. This became my dream to go out to Hawaii and boogie board the same waves as Mike Stewart.

After I graduated high school I joined the United States Air Force. During basic training the Air Force gives everybody a choice of bases in which they want to go to. Then the Air Force will try to put you in one of the bases you choose or as close as they can to it. I put down every base I could find as close to Michigan as I could get and I put 1 overseas base in Hawaii. (Hawaii is considered an overseas base because it is not part of the continental US) Well I did not get Hawaii, but I did get a tropical island in the Pacific being Okinawa, Japan.

At first I wasn’t excited about being sent to Okinawa, but after I started to think about it more I thought that since Hawaii was in the Pacific and they get good waves, that Okinawa must get good waves too. Wrong! When I got to Okinawa and saw the ocean for the first time there were no waves. The only waves Okinawa really gets are big ones during typhoons. Anyway, I enjoyed Okinawa so much I ended up spending 6 years there, when the Air Force told me I had to move to another base and since I was enjoying Japan so much I decided I wanted to try to go to Tokyo. I waited for an assignment in Tokyo for a year and a half and I never got it. So I decided to try to put Hawaii down again. Low and behold the very next assignment cycle I got it. I was on my way to Hawaii.

I did it! I finally achieved my dream of going to Hawaii and body boarding the same waves as Mike Stewart. I body boarded at Bellows, North Shore, out west towards Wainae, and all over. I spent 3 years in Hawaii in the Air Force when I decided that I was going to separate from the Air Force. A company based out of Knoxville, Tennessee contacted me saying they had a position open in Hawaii. I applied for this position as a computer systems administrator and got the job. Now I managed to transition out of the Air Force and purchased a place to live where I am now living my dream of living in Hawaii and boogie boarding, working a an all right job, with owning my own place to live. Even though this was not the way I had imagined it I managed to achieve my dream and am enjoying every day of it, making sure I don’t take anything for granted.

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