Careful
what you wish for, my friend. The worst
punishment the Gods can inflict is to have one's wishes fulfilled. Sadly
enough, I am convinced in the empirical sense that this saying is laden with
more truth than one should assume. What
harm is there to wishes, you might laugh? Believe me, wishes, ideas of
perfection, mental images of the alleged personal happiness resemble naïve
paintings. Not only do they lack the third dimension but also do they lack all the
unknown factors that would come with what we envision. Even if it sounds
hackneyed, every coin has two sides; nothing comes without a counter-part and
surely – in a state of desperate desire – we will miss out on anticipating the
side-effects attached to the things we wish for.
Let’s take
love for example. In the absence of the latter, we become most miserable fools
whining and crying for that one soul mate to rescue us. We wallow in
loneliness, bathe in despair and paint colourful images of what life in love
would look like. We turn an abstract concept into the key to concrete fulfilment
whilst neglecting the circumstance that factual love has nothing in common with
the concept itself. Surely, I am not in a position to philosophise about a
great topic like that claiming to have found the one universal truth, but I can
confidently assert that personally I have found the answers to my amorous questions.
Love has many faces, many phases, many layers and dimensions. No love is like
the other whereas the idea of love is always the same. As soon as our call of
love is answered, as soon as our object of desire turns towards us mirroring
our sentiments, the great generic image we carry in our pockets is perturbed
with an utmost non-generic but individual reality. Two people collide and
create one individual love that might fulfil everything we wished for but more
probably will leave us unsatisfied in various respects. When I was a young and
brash man, I was certainly and painfully aching to meet my one true love, that
person that would be closer to me than anybody else and that I would hold on to
forever. And, I spent a great deal of effort and many years to hunt down that
person. Today, I know that the desired elements of closeness and foreverness
thwarted the fulfilment of my wish. It was pretty much like chasing the
horizon. With every stride you move towards it, it retreats one step. If I had been less blinkered on my quest, I
would have found out a lot earlier that distance and the sacrifice of temporal
aspirations would have brought me a lot closer to my objective.
But let me return
to our original topic. What I am trying to bring across is that a dream can’t
turn into reality in all its details. Our brain is far too small to factor all
possibilities into our equation, to consider all variables. Don’t expect life
to follow the storyline of your fantasy; don’t dream to fulfil it explicitly.
Dream for the sake of inspiration and motivation but be aware, life is the
epitome of surprise and waywardness. Dream to move forward but don’t forget,
once your dream has become true it will be a lot worse than you imagined and a
lot better than you hoped for.
But now I
am tired, these know-it-all monologues cost me quite a bit of energy. And, besides,
who am I to judge.
"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential - for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never." ~ Soren Kierkegaard
