Is It A Mistake To Dream?

Another disappointment as I inch closer to my fantasy

Feed them young as you can play those dreams till death.

I’ve always wanted to do more than I could ever accomplish. No doubt, it’s been a big driver in getting things done. The more you want to create, the more conscious you are of the ticking clock. When you know the To Do List extends beyond your life expectancy, you are forced to evaluate your choices. Is it worth doing this now, if in doing this it means that some other things will have to be moved from “later” to “never”?

Part of dreaming is the question of whether something could be better than this or now. As wonderful as it is to create something, once you have done so, how can you but wonder whether you might now be able to do it even better. We escalate in our ambition. And perhaps that also diminishes our satisfaction.  Can we just be satisfied in the completion or does it require evaluation and comparison?

But when that dream is just glimpsed, even in passing, how can we not feel compelled to chase it down, to give it shape and substance? If that dream becomes our desire, surely we all question just how might we be able to make it manifest.  Can we engineer serendipity? Doesn’t that just require some planning, and then maybe some more planning, and perhaps even more planning on top of it? So what if it takes years to articulate it, flesh it out? If it is becoming more real by doing so, isn’t it gratifying just in that doing?

For most of the readers here, that dream is generally a movie. Perhaps starting as a script and graduating to a project, a package, and maybe even a deal, it can take years. This a particular satisfaction to see it become real, but there are also the setbacks, all the setbacks, because there are always setbacks. But some of those events that first feel negative are also transformative in a good way, in a way that advances the project. We learn to not take that rejection as the ultimate indicator but as something that we can use to discover more, give it shape, and advance it.

But it does take time. So much time. Time that will not be regained. Time that you can not be sure was worth it. But was the alternative? To let the dream die? To grow distracted? Or resentful? Isn’t the the dream worth it? Aren’t you worth it?