How long does your personal idealism can stand?

I am a kind of student who do not go through the academic life continuously. After completing my bachelor degree I didn’t go further to the next degree directly, I worked for a couple of years then again come back to the academic life. This switching on and off between academic life and ‘real’ life enable me to distinguish the impact of those two situation on one who live on it.

Academic life ‘give space’ for our mind, ambition, dream, idealism to grow freely. On my first term academic life (during bachelor degree) I had a slight concern about my surrounding and I did something about it. These concerns can be about the political condition of the country, the world, philosophical stuff, education, and so forth. Among all those I did action on education, I wanted to enhance the foreign language ability of the people around me. That’s why I started a language institution named Quick Study Centre and also in the university I started Let’s Speak English program which meant to teach all the employees (and their family) English.

Then after graduation I entered a new life, which I called ‘real’ life, they are working life and marriage life. Frankly speaking this new life take so much space in my mind, so much time, and so much energy that I have little space in my mind, little time and little energy to just contemplate, contemplating my own life or even my surrounding, so that my concern my idealism about society only comes in the format of thoughts, thoughts and thoughts, only little of them come into action, I did still something about it but not much enough to satisfy me.

Now God give me the chance to feel back the academic life ‘almost’ completely, cause I leave my work and family there in Indonesia, so that the operational activity of being the head of the family do not exist. It created space again.

For you who haven’t enter the working and marriage life, you haven’t really feel the real life yet, so you might not have the empathy of it yet. But it surely will come.

So, since that you know all this now, and if you want to keep having concern and maintain your idealism when you enter the real life, then you must prepare your self.