On Making Wishes

This post is a bit more of a stream-of-consciousness style series of ideas and less of a narrative like my past few posts have been. With today being November 11^th (11/11), though, it only seems fitting.

I really like making wishes when the clock turns to 11:11. If I’m working on an assignment on my laptop or scrolling through my phone or otherwise doing something that involves easy access to a digital clock, and I see that it’s 11:11, I always take a moment to wish for something. It’s cheesy and a little weird, but it makes me happy.

I think I first got into the habit of making wishes at 11:11 in middle school. When my friends and I would stay up late texting each other, one of us would always remind the other around 11:09 that it would soon be time to make a wish. Over the years, it developed into a habit and I started reminding new friends I made in high school, and eventually college, to make wishes, too.

In middle school and a lot of high school, I think making wishes was more about getting reassurance that things in life would work out okay. I wished for good grades a lot, as well as for success in my extracurricular activities. I would wish for the girl I liked to notice me more, or the friend that seemed too cool for me to want to hang out with me more, or the teacher/coach/band conductor who was hard on me to appreciate my hard work a bit more. I think I wished for a lot of these things because I didn’t really have the confidence in myself to believe that my own hard work and character could help me achieve what I wanted—and my own grit and strength could help me make it through the things I didn’t want.

In college, though, I think making wishes has served a different purpose. I’m not crazy and I know that blurting out my inner desires in sixty seconds to a clock won’t actually change anything in my life. I know that if I want better grades, I need to study harder. If I want to form or fix a relationship, I need to talk to the person myself. What making wishes does do, though, is it gives me a moment to reflect on what’s currently going on in my life—what I want to keep and what I want to change. For some reason, 11:11 is one of the few times in the day that I’m one hundred percent honest with myself about what I want. It’s having a minute of mindfulness and introspection that makes 11:11 so important to me, not the hope that once I’ve determined what I want, some magical being sitting behind my clock will make it come true.

I also like to track how my wishes change from night to night and even week to week. If I wish for something more than once, I usually start off big and wish for that thing to come true in a way that I know is pretty unrealistic to my current circumstances. As the days go on, however, I start to mold my wish more carefully. I think about whether the word choice I’m using to make the wish accurately reflects what I really want. I consider whether some of that wish has already come true, and what I can do in real life to make the rest of it also come true. Perhaps most importantly, I ask myself whether what I want is actually what I need or what’s good for me. And if I realize that it’s not—that I’ve been spending weeks wishing for something that sounds better in my head while mesmerized by a row of ones than it actually would work out in real life—I stop wishing for it and I move on to bigger and better wishes. I don’t have any concrete examples of wishes I’ve made that have made me go through these internal dialogues (and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, ‘cause then those wishes wouldn’t come true!). But I know these are all reflections I’ve had—and have had more than once—in that magical sixty seconds before the clock turns to 11:12.

My moment of reflection comes in the form of something kind of silly, but I think a lot of people have their own version of 11:11 in their day. Whether it’s praying at night, or keeping a journal, or talking to a really close friend over lunch, self-reflection is something everyone can benefit from and wishes are something everyone has.

Today, at 11:11 on 11/11, I’m going to make a wish like I always do. Even with the magnitude of the double eleven eleven-ness of the day, I know it probably won’t come true; wishes made to a clock rarely do. But I know that in the process of making that wish, I’m going to learn more about myself. Maybe I’ll even form a plan to make the wish come true through tangible, real-life actions that I can take. Or maybe I’ll decide between 11:11 am and 11:11 pm that I’m actually over it and want something new. 11:11 may only be one minute long, but the self-reflection that springs from it is boundless.