Do you still remember what you wanted to be when you were still a kid?
Do you remember how everything was? How you looked at the world? How the world looked at you? How everything seemed to be?
(c) adam miller
I can still remember the voices of children, my voice included, saying how much they wanted to be astronauts, or firemen, or policemen, or rockstars. How the wonder in our eyes would glow and grow because for so long we’ve been told that anything is possible. And we believed it.
We believed it because we wanted to.
Scratch that.
We believed it because the people who believed in us wanted to.
And can we really blame them for not telling our astronaut-dreaming child-selves that only billionaires can get to go to space? That you can only rewrite the rules when you have money or power or both. That the world doesn’t bend to your liking unless you control it.
It’s hard to break it to a child with wings that they can’t step on the moon when their hopes span as wide as the universe. That’s why reality never gets broken to us by other people. No. We do that ourselves. When we’ve grown and we’ve realized just how large the world is, and how hard people have to work just to get by.
When we see people who were once just as hopeful as us let their dreams linger, and stagnate, and die.
(c) melissa askew
The death of childhood dreams is one of the world’s greatest tragedies. It happens when the children we all once were give up and surrender to the adults we all grow to be. It’s a mercy killing. It’s the prerequisite to move on from hefty goals and daring ambitions to something more practical. More useful.
And we need to do this. It’s hard to live with yourself knowing that you’re playing a role you never wanted to play. And it’s not wrong. It’s not wrong at all to make sense of reality. If we cling too much to our past expectations, we risk never being happy ever again.
But once upon a time, we were all children and we had hope. Then experience taints hope with skepticism, and everything seems to change.
We must abide by what is real, by what can be achieved. Follow the process. Be professional.
“Be realistic,” we hear people say. But the faint soul of the child who was once inside me whispers, “Don’t listen to them.”
Anything is possible.
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