Day 154

'On a scale of now to then', Pen on Paper

When we are young we often have dreams and hopes of things that we want to achieve as we grow up. We also normally have in mind an approximate time scale as to when we want to achieve those things. However for one reason or another, normally as life doesn't really go to plan as much as we would like, these hopes and dreams can fall by the wayside. So when we look back at our life on a scale of now to then we can see that much of what we had planned or envisioned ourselves doing has not come to fruition. Reflecting on our past dreams now though it becomes evident that many of them were destined to never come to pass. the reason  being that when we are young and naive the way in which we looked at the world and how it was described to us by those who had experienced much of life already was that we could achieve anything if we just believed enough. However the harsh reality is that believing simply just isn't enough it also takes hard work, commitment and direction. The problem is then that this is never really explained to us in our youth, possibly as the concepts of reality and how difficult life can be are either too foreign to grasp or are merely hidden from us by our elders rather than risk distorting the innocent wonderment with which we perceive the world. Our elders decision to hide the harsh facts of life from us so that we can grow up at our own pace though has an adverse effect. Which is that we are a lot less prepared to reach our goals as for the most part we learn about how difficult things can be from experience rather than education. People worry too much about how something will effect a young mind, how it may warp or damage the fragility of innocence that they tend to glaze over the truth. The strangeness of this is that the things that they shield us from we will inevitably come into contact with any way, so is it not more worthwhile to prepare us for those eventualities so that we can better deal with them. Now I'm not suggesting that we stomp on an young child's dreams by telling them it can never happen it's more about nurturing them in such a way as to help them understand when it doesn't.

There is a lot that can be learned in the present from looking back at our childhood as this was when we dared to dream the most when we were least scared of the possibilities. The reasons being that we lacked a fear of the unknown as most of what we experienced was new to us and the only real limitations we had were our own imagination, our naivety and our constant indecision... one day we wanted to be a policeman, the next a cowboy and the next an astronaut. Whilst many of our dreams may not have been specifically grounded in reality we saw the possibility and didn't allow rational to hinder us. In our old age and wisdom it is this rational that has instilled a new found fear of the unknown that is the main thing now holding us back. The fear of not knowing if something will pan out, not knowing if we'll be able to pay our bills, not knowing whether we have the necessary skills to make it happen or simply not knowing what we would do if it actually worked. We decide before we have even begun that the probability of failure far outweighs the feasibility of success meaning that we don't even try. It is important then to learn from the unbridled potential we saw in the world as a child and with the benefit of experience and the ability to differentiate between reality and fantasy now begin to reassess those things that have not yet come to pass. The reason being there is still time to achieve them and whilst we may be afraid that it will crumble and slip from our grasp there is no reward without risk. We understand that if we don't try we can't fail but we also can't succeed either unless we decide to throw caution to the wind and just go for it. Essentially then it all boils down to looking back at all the things that we haven't done, thinking about why we haven't done it yet and figuring out how we can now do it.