This essay that I'm not going to use

The bottle washed up onto the Guatemalan seashore one day, off the coast of a tiny fishing village. Wrapped in seaweed and dipped in salt, the green glass no longer had a manufactured luster, but was rubbed rough and grainy by its sandy environment.

Seventeen days later, a man dragging a canoe tripped over these rocks as he walked past. He was at that stage of old where all the mottled skin on his face just seemed to fold over another pallet of skin. The face that completed the picture was tanned and leathery, from a life in the sun. It was Wednesday morning, a little after dawn.

He had not come this far down the beach for a long time. The fish had been plentiful enough closer to home, and in his age it was becoming harder to walk great distances, especially when he had to drag his canoe and supplies behind him. This week however, the fish supply had dwindled, and so he had to move down the coast. They are tired of coming down to see me, so I must come to see them, the old man thought, smiling.

But he had stumbled over something-something he hadn’t noticed before. Leaving his canoe in the sand (his arms sighed with relief) he reached down and gingerly picked the strange object off of the ground. He scraped the seaweed off of the glass with his fingernail.

He noticed a rudimentary cork stopped in the top of the bottle. Becoming excited, he twisted the cork out of the rim of the glass. Holding the bottle up to his eye, he looked inside, resembling a sea captain peering through a telescope. A tiny scroll of paper floated from the bottom of the bottle to his eyelid. The man removed the scroll and unraveled it quickly, eager to see the message inside. He read it quickly, then frowned.

Follow your bliss.

He turned the message over, as if there would be a translation into Spanish, or even Mam, his Mayan language. Picking the canoe off the ground once again, he pocketed the message and resolved to ask his son, who spoke a little English, to translate later.

Follow your bliss is a maxim first stated by mythologist Joseph Campbell, but introduced to me by my father. It seems easy enough to follow and yet is somehow one of the most challenging goals to realize. My father says it when I am feeling most unsure about my future. Can I do everything I want? Is it realistic? Is it selfish to want something this badly? It is basically permission that yes, my dream is worth working for, and that yes, I should try. Once I had that mantra in my head I knew nothing could keep me from my goals. Once I had that mantra in my head, I wanted to share it with as many people as possible.

When the old man showed his son the message that evening, his son looked at it for a minute, then smiled.

“¿Qué significa?” the old man asked eager to know the meaning of the mysterious message.

“Esto significa, ‘siga su sueño.’” He smiled at his father, who laughed.

“Mi hijo, que es exactamente lo que he hecho,” the old man said wistfully. That was exactly what he had done.  He knew it was true too—he had lived his life honestly, had a family, and worked hard.