There are three words that kill dreams. The funny thing is that most people would consider these three words necessary to make dreams come true. And they do… But as our grandmothers used to say: “There is a place for everything, and everything in its place”, I think something is seriously out of place.
We are a society increasingly focused on pragmatism, on how. We want to get things done and we invest a lot in finding out what works. But we are increasingly a society focused on getting results by looking to what already works whilst dismissing the ideals that seeded them. And this can have a strangling effect on your dreams.
Why? Because ideals, and dreams built from ideals are often not pragmatic. They usually require new ways of thinking to realize. They may offer few (if any) guarantees of success but lots of perceived risk and maybe some real uncertainty. In fact, ideals are not meant to be reasonable or even practical at times. And for that reason, many (unconsciously) negate them in favor of ‘what works’.
At what point did it become okay to sacrifice our dreams because they weren’t practical?
At no other time in history than now was it more convenient to dream ‘impossible’ dreams. If we have a job and food we are doing better than a great percentage of humanity. The opportunities for making a living in a myriad of different ways are better now than they have ever been.
Again I ask: why would you deny that something you yearned after was valuable simply because you couldn’t get it? You can yearn for and value world peace and the unity of mankind if you so wish it (and I do!).
Yes, it may seem unrealistic but some people work towards world peace, the eradication of world poverty. Yes, the odds they face seem insurmountable but they value the ideal itself enough to act on it.
You need why as well as how
Life is full of paradoxes. As you may know, a paradox exists where two seemingly opposing ideas are true as the same time.
For example, in order to be at your most freely creative you need to know the limits you are breaking free of or transcending. And even optimists need some pessimism to make sure they’re prepared for things that may go wrong. As Winston Churchill used to say: “I’m an optimist but I still carry an umbrella!”
We need the ‘how’ – AND we need the why first (and always ) if we are to unfurl and blossom the dream.This is the essence of genius – to be able to hold two opposing ideas in mind at once.
I think we are killing our ‘genius’ by focusing on one side of the success coin to the exclusion of the other.
I think that we are guilty of holding “How do I?” up as an object of worship. We so want results we are getting more and more wary of anything that smacks of an uncertain outcome.
Yet think of someone like Martin Luther King. Having read some of his life history it is not clear that he started with a plan for creating equality amongst all men. Yet he had a dream (!) and he was prepared to try many different avenues for the sake of the dream. He had no guarantee of success and stood to anger some very influential people (not to mention a great number of common people.) He was an idealist who learned how to become a pragmatist.
What we seem to have forgotten (or foregone) is that ideals are valuable in and of themselves. Honesty, justice – the virtues – are beautiful. Wanting to change the world for the better is an ideal, and can be beautiful. It just may not be an instantly beautiful process. In fact, it might be quite a stumbling frustrating one, but one always driven by the ideal.
Having a passion about an ideal, sadly, scares people because we often nowadays see them played out in practical form through extremism of a negative kind – suicide bombers for example. But just because the ideas of fundamentalism and idealism have become associated with terrorism does it mean that finding something fundamentally valuable – and living and loving for it – is inherently bad?
Think of how the world has also changed for the better because of idealism.
You could easily say that Mother Theresa was an extremist in her love for the poor. She said she was driven by the idea that every battered diseased body she was treating was the body of her Lord Jesus. Whether you agree with her motives it’s impossible to deny her impact for the good.
However, I suspect if this little unassuming Albanian nun had suggested she set up a worldwide organization of nuns devoted to serving the poor when she first started she would have been laughed out of the nunnery because it didn’t seem practical.
TFF
Posts
TESTING
ReplyDelete