[ESSAY] Let Your Dreams Be Dreams
When someone says, “realize your passions” in any context, it often invokes an act of manifestation. To make your dreams come true, you must render them. Hard wrought fulfillment is the popular notion — passions take 10,000 hours to consummate, and only experts can exhale in satisfaction. Consider this however, most English speakers describe the world and themselves using only active or passive predication: I won freedom (active), or, my freedom was taken from me (passive). Perhaps no surprise, this linguistic scope conceives of subject-object relationships in one-dimension: either you’re with my dreams or against them! Shia LaBeouf’s meme of “Don’t let your dreams be dreams, just do it!” is the axiomatic expression of one-dimensional dreaming. But what if the only way to realize your dreams was to let them be dreams? This makes no sense, if we don’t have an understanding of the middle-voice in English.
Not explicitly evident in any romance language, the middle-voice predicates reflexively and in a participatory relationship such that it is unclear whether the subject or the object is more active. To realize is a great middle-voice verb, because it is inherently ambiguous due to its multiple facets; realizing can aberrate the individual subject similar to a prism refracting a once singular beam of light. All you need to do is look up the verb to understand that its literal meaning is at least two-fold: perceive something, and make something real. All too often, passions are thought of in an active-voice, as a distant etherea that must be wrested into existence through a rigorous pursuit. Woe be the passive dream neglectors! But realizing one’s passions in a middle-voice inflection suggests that it is at least partly an act of registering, and participating in what already exists, instead of acting on a desire for an imagined future-achievement. Let’s not make mincemeat of the word however, because clearly being mindful or aware of one’s passions is also an act of making them real.
If passions, or day I say happiness is understood as a function of acquisition, then being happy is forever in abeyance since acquisition as such has no satisfaction. And make no mistake (although it is easily done), obtaining an object of desire is not the same thing as satisfying the logic of acquisition; again, the latter is a contradiction in terms. When we tell ourselves that we will delay gratification and be happy if we achieve x-y-z, we are not positing whatever that consummation is to end our desire, but instead approximating the unattainable asymptote of our imagined fulfillment. This is why we all trick ourselves into believing that if we just get that next thing or goal, that we will be hunkydory, only to then get it and succumb to buyer’s remorse, coldfeet, boredom. More sensible than this, perhaps happiness is realized through a perceptive kind of realization, such as gratitude. And low and behold, it would seem that gratitude enables us to grow outward from our sphere of competence and even invite new things to enter our life. Inadvertently, the middle-voice realization of one’s dreams can enable acquisition, but not in the direct will-to-passion that is often endeavored.
So instead of asking yourself what is the passion or dream or happiness that you lack and need to make a reality within a 10-year plan, stop and think, or realize what the threads are that already make your life worth living. Pluck those strings, and feel them hum way back before your time, and excitingly far into a future horizon of possibilities. As a personal anecdote, I was once convinced that I had to make great art, but upon asking myself what actually made me happy day to day, and also made my friends happy — it wasn’t my art (at least not exclusively), it was quite a few other things that I had overlooked due to my obsession with dream-manifestation! I was stuck in an active-voice, and not considering what a middle-voice could say about my life. Practice this happiness enumeration now and then and you too might be surprised to catch the discrepancy between your imagined dreams and your actual passions.
Realizing one’s middle-voice happiness is liberating precisely because it becomes clear that the onus of passion is not exclusively on the subject, rather we are all participating in many dreams that extend way beyond our own individual agency. Whew, what a load off! All too often however, the imperative to “find your passion, make your dreams come true, etc” is motivated by a litany of deficiency, making the pursuit of happiness an emotional highway to hell, rife with ingratitude and blindness to everything that is enjoyable right now. Let your dreams be dreams! They already substantiate your life — all you need to do is realize that, and continue to play with them. Chances are, you’ve been living your dreams all this time for at least 10,000 hours. Rejoice, you’ve made it. Now you can just spend the rest of your life celebrating your dreams and letting them develop in exciting and unexpected ways — what an idea!
Initially written elsewhere on August 26, 2018
