Distracted By Dreams
The rain pours outside and SUBOT, my computer, is fired up and ready to go. I sit down, all set to work. I start making progress, things start getting checked off the list. The invisible progress bar starts to move along. This is where it gets dangerous.
I’m a dreamer. I always have been and probably always will be. Some days, I love that about myself and others, well, I’d like to tell my brain to shut up and get to work again. This little post is a product of one morning where I realized the importance of my seemingly annoying daydreaming habit.
I’ve started writing some fiction again. I say “again” as if I had written any before, hah. In my childhood, I always wanted to be an author. To my credit, I wrote a short book called “The Rock of Fate” in fourth grade — proudly bound together with one of those transparent presentation binders. I’ve always loved reading fantasy and as a kid I would crank out all of these crazy stories and pretend like I was a bestselling author. Right now, whatever I’m writing is pretty awful, as it would be for a beginner. No, I won’t be publishing anything. (Nothing soon at least). Anyways, it was while I was writing this morning that I started this terrible daydream.
I don’t mean terrible in the sense that my thoughts themselves were terrible. In fact, it’s just the opposite. My brain tends to jump from one exciting outcome to the next in this everlasting chain of “what-ifs” and “it’ll be so cool when…” No, my frustration is that instead of actually working on something, I’m pacing around the room like a crazy person, wasting my time.
That’s when I realized something about creativity, and I wanted to write it down. The mind is most creative when unhindered, right? My most creative moments are when I feel like anything is possible. It’s when I feel like I’m a superhero of my own mind, changing things as I will them to. It’s when I feel like my future is clear of roadblocks and I become a firm believer in the timeless saying: “everything will work out.”
As I wring my hands in frustration, I realized that while I felt that I wasn’t doing enough, I was actually doing something very important. I’m imagining. I’m taking down the barriers of possibility and thinking of the craziest things out there. And then, I’ll put the barriers back and see what I have to work with. Most of the time, there’s something pretty good that’s left.
That’s my kind of creativity. I unconditionally support the possibility of the impossible. That’s what gets me to open up my mind and think critically about all sorts of situations. I realize now that the same skills that go into writing ridiculous stories are the same skills that help me design better applications. They’re the same skills that allow me to help my friends when they need me and the same skills that enable me to have a great conversation with a stranger.
Dreaming isn’t always a waste of time. It’s not very practical, it’s not scientific. It’s this weird, fluffy, fleeting stuff that initially seems to have no bearing on life. Yet, it’s important. It’s important, and it drives us every day to make a better world. Being a dreamer makes me who I am, and while I’ll probably still grit my teeth and wonder endlessly why my brain insists on taking tangents, I don’t think I’d give it up for anything.
