Has Your Dream Been Crushed?
by Stuart Goldsmith

You probably had the glimmer of a dream when you were a youngster, but this was soon knocked out of you. Your parents undoubtedly called your dream unrealistic. Then, to the sound of a points-lever being pulled, they suggested to you that you get a 'practical' education in order that you might follow your dream at a later date. I am not implying any malevolence here, you need to remember that your parents, and all preceding generations did not have the luxury of fancy life planning.

The name of their game was survival. To survive you needed money. To get money you needed a good job. To get a good job you needed a good education. They pulled those levers on you for the best of intentions, but the result was a disaster for your fledgling ambitions.

This message was reinforced by teachers, friends and careers advisers, until by the time you left full-time education you were almost certainly way off the main line and heading fast down some insignificant branch line.

Throughout these years, you learned the trick of suppressing your dream. You simply could not maintain this dream in the face of such ordered opposition and so you buried it in a secret place within you.

Then the pace of life started really to heat up, and problems started to come at you like a pack of hungry jackals. No time for fancy, childish dreams now. All of your energies were involved, and probably still are involved, in fighting off the pack of slavering dogs. Dreams are... well, for dreamers. There is a life to be lived, food to put on the table, a mortgage to be paid and other people to worry about.

If you even remember your dream, you probably fool yourself into thinking you'll pick it up later, when the family has grown up, when you are retired. Some time. The tragedy here is that most people's dreams become so deeply buried they not only forget what they are, but even forget that they had a dream in the first place. Certainly, few people can put a name to their dream. Instead, they sit in the sidings, rusting away, perhaps (if this is not pushing the railway analogy too far) hoping that some bright, gleaming locomotive will arrive one day to pull them to safety.

Is it any wonder that they are depressed?

I want to make another important observation at this point.

To be fair, I do not think that we are well equipped to get in contact with our dreams and to plan a glittering, fulfilling and exciting life for ourselves. Man has only existed for around one million years, perhaps two million at the absolute maximum. For 99.9% of that time, we lived short, brutish lives which were wholly obsessed with creating sufficient food, water and shelter for our basic survival. Few people lived beyond 35 years old. I strongly suspect that life planning was not an issue which occupied the thoughts of men and women prior to a few hundred years ago.

Even the wealthy had few choices. The son of a rich family joined the army, became a priest, or took over the running of the family business. In general, he was not full of angst regarding his special purpose on the planet. Such thinking is a luxury, brought about by material wealth and the increase in health and hygiene. We live longer. We are all richer. We have the luxury of being able to consider our true purpose and we have the leisure time to be unhappy if we do not fulfill that purpose.

Until next time...

Stuart Goldsmith
© 2003 Stuart Goldsmith - Worldwide Rights Reserved