Hello you,
One of my housemates has a poster
on his wall with a speech from someone about dreaming. It said that not
succeeding doesn’t matter as long as you had a dream and you went for it. The
speech resonated with me. (I will update this post with the entire speech).
I’ve always been a dreamer. I see
or think about things that I would love to do and then go ahead and do them. My
roommate in first year once remarked, “You are a big dreamer aren’t you?” I
told her that yes, I am. I like dreaming. I like telling myself that the world
much bigger than I can imagine and there are many things to do and see.
And I’m not wrong. The world is
bigger than you think. YOU have more potential than you think you do. So why
not dream? I know that sometimes dreaming can lead to disappointment. I
couldn’t be able to tell you how many dreams I went for that ended in
disappointment and a lot of doubt in my own abilities. It happens. But that
doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream. Here’s something I wrote a while ago about
this (I write little stories and dialogues quite often and this one I wrote on
a piece of paper in a train):
“You
shouldn’t indulge yourself in whims and dreams of this kind.”
“Why
not?”
“It
leads to false hope.”
“What’s
wrong with a little hope?”
“It
leads to disappointment.”
“That’s
absurd, that’s like telling me not to smile because I’ll be sad. Disappointment
and sadness are an inherent part of life. You never know what is going to
happen and you shouldn’t begrudge yourself the good things just because you
think the bad things will come. They will come, but so will the good things.”
It’s sort of a rough draft and I
wrote is as a conversation with myself, after writing it, I forgot about it
until today. It’s easy to get deterred from dreaming. When we try some things
the outcome isn’t what we hoped, we lose courage and we tell ourselves we will
never try again because the disappointment hurts that much. Do not give up
trying, do not give up dreaming. Especially if it’s something you want so
badly. Failures are a part of success; with every fail, you learn to do better
and it’s one step closer to your goal. Look at it like this, you’re playing a
game and you want to get to the next level or save the princess or whatever.
Each time you lose, you take note of what you can do to avoid that from
happening and then you play again and so on, and before you know it, you have
saved the princess (or you’ve been promoted to the next level). How did you do
that? You learned from your past failures. Don’t you think this is more
worthwhile than just easily achieving all of your dreams? If that happened,
your dreams will have no value and you also won’t be proud of yourself for how
much you’ve come.
Let me tell you a little back
story. My parents do not know this but I have them to thank for allowing me to
dream. When I was 4 years old, we moved from my ‘toddler-hood’ home where we had
a lot of friends to play with to the farms, a place where houses were so far
apart from each other and you couldn’t just greet your neighbor over the fence.
We were so bored and my siblings and I would set off to the neighboring farms
to find friends. There were not many kids our age around but there were some
kids at our direct neighbor’s. There
were two older boys, a slightly older girl (that my sister talked to) and a
younger boy who was both my brother and I’s friend. This little boy had a room
full of toys. His room was like Toys R Us and the most perplexing thing? He
kept asking his mother for more. Dude had a chest full of LEGO and he wanted
more toys! Every time my brother and I went over to his house to play, we’d
find him in his room and I’d ask to play with his LEGO and it was great, but he
never wanted to stay inside and play with his toys; he preferred to go outside
and ride his bicycle. Very soon after, he and his family moved away and for a
long time, my siblings and I were friendless.
Not to worry though, we read a lot,
losing ourselves within the pages of our books. When we weren’t reading, my
brother and I ventured out and made our own fun. We’d climb trees, build tree
houses and our own go-karts (Sorry Mum, for desecrating all your chairs and
sorry Dad for using up your tools) and at night before we slept, my brother and
I would invent stories about what will happen to us in a few years and where we
will be and let me tell you, we dreamed. Even though we had limited resources
and we were so far away from people our age, we made our own fun, our own
worlds and we did anything we wanted to because we believed we could. There was
no one we could compare ourselves to, and no one to tell us we couldn’t do
anything (Except my parents telling us not to waste tools haha). We drew crazy
comics, cut up magazines and made funny collages and one occasion, my brother
almost burned the house messing around with chemicals. We thought we could heal
animals and insects (we injected one dying insect with water, yikes!). Years
later, we still live in the same place and I want to thank my parents for
moving us there. Even though our social skills are often times questionable,
our imagination is not. I still dream, and I’m on my way to achieving ALL of
those dreams, and perhaps, better.
So I challenge you to dream. Do you
have a dream? What it is? Dream better than that and by all means, chase it
with everything you have! To quote a line from the movie Inception, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bit bigger,
darling.” So dream, however crazy. Do not allow anyone to tell you that your
dream is out of reach. But please don’t forget one core element to dreaming;
believing in yourself.
