I have always been a dreamer. Even when I was a little kid my thoughts were always full of how my life could be different or of how the world could become a better place. Sometimes, after my mom had tucked me into bed with an instruction to stay in my bed no matter what, I'd sneak over to the large window in my bedroom and stare outside into space. I would find an area of the sky that was filled with the most stars and I would wait. I would whisper a wish (because wishes always had to be said outloud) and wait for a shooting star to fall and make my wish come true.

Sometimes my wishes would be for myself and other times I would make wishes for my friends or my family. I didn't like it that my knee got all scraped up when I fell down on the playground, and I didn't like it that other kids got made fun of if they had to wear glasses. So I would make wishes about things like these. I would wait on a shooting star in hopes that my mom would stop crying so much or so that my baby sister wouldn't be sick all the time. I believed with all my heart that all it took for my dreams to come true was seeing a shooting star fall from the sky. I believed there was something magical about a shooting star, something in it that was the answer to peoples' problems.

Even now, as an adult, I find myself wondering if wishing on a shooting star doesn't in some way help solve the problems of the world. It seems like too many of my childhood wishes got answered for there to not be at least a little magic in a shooting star. Of course now my wishes are for bigger things like world peace or the eradication of all of the world's poverty. I dream about a world without violence and about a world where every child is given a chance to live. And while most of the time these dreams never make it outside the walls of my own mind, every now and then I'll be outside on a clear night and find myself gazing up to the sky and wishing my dreams outloud, just above a whisper.

I'm not sure if I keep looking for a shooting star because I really believe in it's magic or if I'm just caught up in a habit from my childhood. Either way, I guess it is good for me to believe in the power of a little dreaming and of wishing upon a shooting star.