Wish upon a star
by Paige Newman, Intern Writer, Rock Canyon High School
An eyelash. A fountain. A broken wishbone. Dropping a penny in the well. The birthday candles on a cake. A star shooting across the sky.
Why are these things important? Why do we wish on them? Why do we wish at all?
Why, each year on our birthdays, do we stop everything we are doing to make that one wish that we hope will come true? Why do we keep wishing for it, or wishing for anything, year after year, when it doesn’t come true?
And if a wish ever does come true, is that the end of our wishing? Do we stop and bask in the happiness of having a wish become reality, or do we realize we have a long list of other wishes to get to? When is it ever enough?
Maybe its never enough. Maybe we are asking too much, making too many wishes. Or maybe when a wish comes true, we just have hope that the next one will too.
Its as if, in a world surrounded by negatives, a wish is just another way to be let down. To discourage. To give false hope. And yet, we keep on wishing.
On almost every birthday candle I can remember, I have wished for the same thing. On every eyelash that falls onto my fingers, I wish for the same thing. When I saw my first shooting star and gasped at the chance to make a wish, it was the same one. I share this experience with so many other people, because really, how many can honestly say that their wishes have become reality, even after multiple tries?
Almost every fairytale movie is full of wishes. Cinderella wishes to go to the ball. Jack wishes to be as tall as a beanstalk. Peter Pan wishes to be a real boy. Why put all of these false expectations into our heads of wishes coming true if more often than not, they don’t?
I think it all boils down to believing. These fairytales teach us to believe in something, to believe that our dreams can be achieved. Or furthermore, that we can be the ones to make our dreams come true.
It’s a lesson that we take with us our entire lives. When we try to make a sports team, when we try to get an A in that particular class, when we try to get into the college of our dreams, we have learned to make it happen ourselves; that simply making a wish does not make it come true.
We learn this with every experience we go through. We learn that we have to not only believe in ourselves, but also work hard enough to meet our goals. We learn that, though it may be a cliché, we control whether or not our dreams come true. Maybe, somehow, the wishes and the dreams are connected.
And so, when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.
