Sometimes I have to wonder if dreaming is really good for you or not.
I don’t mean night-time sleep dreams, but rather daydreams and aspirations and hopes and wishes.
My whole life I have listened to the poets, the writers, the artists, the teachers say to use your imagination, to follow your heart, to reach for the impossible goal….
But isn’t that just setting 99% of us up for failure?
It seems like when you are young and try to do things, everyone tells you that you can’t, you’re too young. Then you get older and they tell you to act more mature, be responsible. Then you get even older and people won’t hire you, won’t take a chance on you. And then you are too old. Maybe you don’t give a shit what they say anymore, but you feel like shit anyway, so … shit.
Meanwhile, you have the dreams of the things you want to do, but they seem to beat you down constantly, instead of giving you hope that you will make it someday.
Don’t beleive me that they beat you down? Go back and look through old photos. How does that make you feel? Do you get happy looking at all of the pictures of your young beautiful friends and yourself? Or does it make you the epitome of melancholy?
Be honest.
You know why? Because you’re not looking back and thinking “Wow! We had such great dreams, and they all came true!”
Nope.
Kind of the opposite.
So I have to wonder. Would 99% be better off if we would have been brought up to beleive that we would be happy if we would just do our jobs right the first time, spend time with our family and friends whenever possible, sing Christmas Carols, and try to enjoy life as we work our way through it?
Oh, wait. That sounds exactly like the things people used to try to teach their kids. I remember my grandmother saying stuff like that.
Maybe I should have listened to her.
I mean, I know she didn’t much like the crappy part time job she had. (She worked at JC Penny’s in retail.) But really she did it for the extra pocket money and to meet people. She liked both of those a lot. I know she didn’t like doing laundry, or dishes, or cleaning house. But she loved playing tag around the sheets on the clothesline, the whole world was happy when she was cooking, and teasing kids with a feather duster or that monster vacuum cleaner while she cleaned was nearly something she lived for.
What were her dreams and hopes?
I don’t know. She never told me. She never cried over not reaching them. She never wasted time sitting on the porch and thinking about them.
She spent her time doing her job right the first time and then enjoying the shit out of everything she could.
When I look back, that’s kind of what I wish I would have done. Instead of spending years wasting my life dreaming about what I wanted to do, I could have been enjoying the shit out of what I had.
Now it seems, all I know how to do is wish I had something I don’t.
That’s kind of what they taught me.
How do I stop wishing I hadn’t wasted my life and just enjoy what I do have now?
No one ever taught me that.
But Vodka helps! I always enjoy the right now with Vodka.
Kind of.