There’s sand in your eyes.
Ah, what are dreams?, he wondered out loud. It was a rhetorical question, but she took it up, as always.
Dreams are declarations.
Declarations?
Yes. A way to announce yourself, if you will.
To whom?
To yourself. The moment that’s done, it’s all done. Everyone knows. All anyone ever has to do is to meet you and they’ll know the dream you chose.
How do you do that?
There you go with the questions. I love you for it, but there’s no math to this. Or at least not the kind of math we know. If you ask me how, I can only say by the energy you’ll be emanating.
I never took you for a New Age kind of girl.
I’m not. Most of New Agers talk of energy as if it were a slave at your disposal, a dumb thing to shoot at other people or wield like magic. That’s not what this is about. The energy other people feel from you is not something separate from you. It, in the most basic sense, is you. It’s no different than a child playing in the wet sand.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so keen to listen as I am now.
You’ve never known somebody as listenable as I am.
If it were anyone else, I’d have a hundred ways to make fun of that sentence. Since it’s you, I‘ll just ask you to continue. Wet sand?
Yes. It’s pliable, mouldable, it yields, it’s soft, there’s no harm to be found in it. With the help of a red bucket, a little girl will maybe make a tower. Or she’ll use the star shapes to scatter stars everywhere, sprinkling them through her fingers. Or maybe she’ll listen to her father’s instructions and create something that makes much sense to all the adults, just not to her. There’s many ways to approach wet sand, just as there’s many ways to approach life. The imprint the girl leaves in the sand is just like the imprint I make on the people and the world around me. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that things are the way they are, unchangeable, or changeable only by people bigger than me.
Which would be nearly everyone, seeing how short you are.
Very funny. Still, you’re right, but only in the most narrow, physical sense. To go back to the energy I mentioned before, think of the toy shapes the child brings to the sand beach: stars, crabs, towers, grids, and many others. She has many choices at her disposal, and the wet sand will in the end reflect her choice, whatever it is. That’s the beauty of it, that the sand doesn’t really care. It is good for one thing, and one thing only — to reflect the choice the little girl makes. Whatever it is, whenever it’s made. The energy people feel coming from you is the equivalent to choosing a toy shape from your own toy bag. You reach inside, rummage through, pull one out and that’s what you become. We are a lot like wet sand, or plain water — there’s immense power inside us, but it must be given shape. The tricky part is that the water will take just about any shape, leaving the burden of responsibility squarely on my shoulders. Should I pull vanity out of my toy bag now, that’s the shape I’m imprinting in the sand, that’s the container I’m pouring my water in.
Which is when you become the choice you’ve made?
Exactly.
I understand. Where do the dreams come in though? You said before dreams are declarations, but I always thought them as nothing more than flights of fancy. A way to flee the world. A way of coping.
That’s where you went wrong.
Thanks.
I’m serious. Before I said that dreams are declarations, but they’re more like physical exercises. They’re a way to explore the very boundaries of the person you are. They present you with always the same challenge — how outrageously satisfying can you imagine your life to become, while still rooting that imagination in reality?
What’s the use of that? The more outrageous my dreams, the deadlier their collision with reality, roots or no roots. No matter how much I dream of flying, I won’t grow wings.
That depends entirely on your definition of wings. If I told you that you have been in a flying car a hundred times by now, you’d think me crazy. Every child who has read a piece of science fiction has felt the coolness of the idea of a flying car, which is why everyone’s still slightly disappointed at the sight of these boring boxes on wheels. But a flying car is just way to transport things or people through air, isn’t it? So don’t we have flying cars already, in the shapes of airplanes and helicopters? Maybe yes, maybe not. Depends, you see, how you define a flying car. How you define your wings.
Never thought of it that way.
Almost no one does. And as for the collision of dreams with reality, that’s a very real concern, but not with dreams per se. There’s both a thin line and a world of difference between dreams and one of their extremes — delusion. It’s one thing to pick a star shape out of the toy bag, and quite another to pick the crab shape and pretend it’s a star.
What’s the other extreme?
The inability to explore yourself. Somewhat like playing in a football field, but only ever choosing to stay within your own penalty area. Yes, it’s safe, but the chance of own goals is disproportionately larger. And nothing hurts as much as own goals do.
Football fan?
Nope. It is a handy metaphor though, isn’t it?
Yes, yes it is.
Why’d you ask what I thought dreams were?
I didn’t. It was a rhetorical question.
Right.
Can I ask you one more rhetorical question?
Think you don’t quite get the point of rhetorical questions, but go ahead.
What happens when the high tide comes and takes away all you’ve done in the sand?
You begin anew.
That easy?
No, not that easy. It’s just the truth. The high tide doesn’t take anything away — instead it always, again and again, provides the smooth sand for you to make your choices in.
Thanks for reading.
