Follow your dreams, well…
Follow your dream, just do it! Well…
How often do we get to hear this? As a loving encouragement, topped up with a bit of ‘everything is possible’. But hardly anyone ever talks about the broken ones. The dreams we went after and which didn’t work out in the end. Maybe it’s because we are such a success driven society, that we view broken dreams as failures, so we rather don’t look at them.
It’s not such a fascinating story to tell, is it?
‘I had a dream and it plummeted, who wants to say that… and now I am heartbroken, disappointed, trying to find the next step in my life. I am wondering whether having dreams is such a great thing altogether.’
And still by the time we have come to a certain age, all of us have a graveyard of broken dreams we carry around with us. It might have gone underground, most probably stored away in the basement area of our soul. But it’s there alright:
The happily ever after, which wasn’t so happily after all.
The great health, which allowed us to do anything and everything not being so great anymore.
The wonderful new place we moved to, which turned out to be not that wonderful after all.
There’s a danger, that if we don’t look at those broken dreams, don’t grieve them in some capacity, that we might feel either very defeated at some point or that we keep on creating dreams, which are headed towards disaster from the get go. Because they were more made for fantasy land and we didn’t root them in reality at all.
I for sure have been guilty of both of those things. Feeling defeated as well as creating unattainable fantasies. But it’s easily done in a world, which often seems to be governed by extremes.
In this case it would be two very different narratives. Either it is subscribing to reality and you get what you see. Or it is, just concoct a dream, you can do and create anything, off you go. Both of those are extremely short sighted and rooted in a black and white kind of thinking.
In the reality scenario we will never attempt to change anything or dream for more possibilities.
In the fantasy scenario we will just deny reality altogether, steam ahead until we have driven ourselves over the edge and crash.
Extremes are most of the time unhealthy for us. Of course the dream narrative gets fostered by many industries, it makes a lot of money. Creating unfulfilled wishes for people to hunt after.
I personally believe, it is important to create more balanced narratives, also for the generations to follow.
We might say something like this:
‘In the course of your life, you will have many dreams. Some of them you will try out and some of them are just for fantasy. Some of the ones you try out will be great, others might fail miserably. Yes, dream big, challenge reality, but also stay rooted in that which is real at the same time. By a certain age you will have a graveyard of broken dreams and that’s a beautiful thing to have. Look after the graves, plant some beautiful flowers. Visit from time to time, while creating new dreams, which might work for a while or they might not work at all. Just be curious and see what happens, you’ve got this. Graveyards are as much part of life as new seedlings. We honour both.’