A better title might exist but I am content with this one!
‘Follow your dreams, you may not make money but will never be poor. Follow other people’s dreams you can make money but will never be rich.’ − Paulo Coelho
How difficult it is to live a life you always dreamed of. This is a question we all ponder upon and once we hit that twenty plus mark, we devote days and months into realizing how practically impossible it is to achieve that. Last week was mixed with these thoughts and so I’ll be penning it all down.
We all dream of different things but all these things have one thing in common, to stand out off the crowd. In other words, one could think that would mean to be famous, be someone the world will look out to, be an example in one or the other TED talks, be an inspiration and be a success. But (and this is a very big but) in accordance with the society. So while being that, we need to be perfect for this mythical world too. We want to fly high but never lose the ground. The society asks us to be an engineer, be a doctor, be a lawyer, and be a husband or a wife. Do what you love to do but never go off the track. Be a professional and be a family person as well. Stab people in their back and climb the ladder but don’t be an idiot who would give away his promotions on some morally ethical grounds. Because ethics is only a subject for children, meant to be forgotten.
And if you try and go off the track, if you try and be an artist then be a ‘million dollar worth a tea’ kind of celebrity. There is no in between. So yes, success in terms of these grounds is completely disastrous.
It makes you a failure in your own eyes, makes you a loser in the eyes of the society. We forget to honor the many years taken to design that, the many efforts woven to craft it, which might have been worth a tale to every ear, if given a voice.
When we are forced to create art in order to be appreciated with some green paper bills rather than the true intuitiveness of the piece, it loses its soul, its credibility, its existence and gets transformed into a business.
Without losing track of the main idea behind this article, I would continue to focus upon this myth of a tale. We have so drastically related success to money that we have forgotten the real sense of art. We would blindly follow a below average writer with his pseudo inspirational tale that we forget that there might be a gem hidden in our hindsight who has a much appreciative tale to narrate but since he has been missing the most important attribute, being either money or luck or both, we laugh at his apparent failure and tag him as a loser.
We are fogged by these suffixes following someone names that make them a star, that make us their admirers. It is this resume of a thing that makes us follow them and not the actual person.
Each one of us appreciate art, we have our favorite composers, authors, actors and directors. We applaud them and sing their tales but when one of us decide to be that, we become skeptical. We never praise them for their talent, but measure them in the accounts of how much bills that talent could pay off.
Because that is what we are turning our children into, money mongers. Someone who is ready to commit an ethical crime if that means more money. Someone who would stab his own heart to attain his peace of mind by earning more pieces of paper rather than caressing his soul with his actual solace.
All those dreams of childhood, of being an astronaut, a scientist, an actor, a poet, gets entrapped in this whirlpool of adulthood and makes you nothing but an employee, a slave of this mythical society, a preacher of the tale of a perfect person, who is very efficiently managing his job and family, feigning a smile like a clown for this society and being someone in the crowd who has forgotten his very purpose of life.
There is no conclusion to such an article, other than realizing your own worth and start analyzing your own merits and demerits without letting your conscience hold you back because of this apparent society and its rule.
And let the dreams of your childhood guide your way to your old age such that you end your life as you once began, satisfied and content with your heart, still dreaming and laughing. You might still be a failure for this world but you’ll be an extraordinary success for your heart and your soul.
And on the same grounds, since I have preached to begin and end life with a similar context, I’ll end this article as I started it.
‘Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.’ − Paulo Coelho
