Wake UP!!!
***A man, hungry and tired, with his last rm50 note in his pocket, stood outside a casino and gazed longingly at the entrance.
"No, you musn’t go in there. What are the odds of you winning anything substantial? It’ll be better to buy some food, fill up your stomach and find a job! You may be broke now but hard work and a bit of luck will improve your life," a voice in the man’s brain told him.
"Go in! This is your last chance to strike it rich! Who knows what will happen tomorrow! Why care about toiling on and on when you could be dead in an hour’s time? You are a man, and we must HOPE, there will be MIRACLES!" another voice, this one in the man’s heart, persuaded him.
The man stood at the casino doorway, swaying this way and that, while his heart and brain debated fiercely. Finally, he chose to trust in the magic of Hope and Miracles and went in.
An hour later the man walked out in a daze. He’d lost everything.***
What am i trying to say through the story above? Well…honestly, i created it. Just to give an analogy of what i wana say.
Many of us like to live in a world of fantasy and dreams. I was, and still am, that kind of person too. In our fantasies everything is beautiful, sweet and nice. Everything is indestructible, everyone immortal. Whatever we do, or try to do, become huge successes and we feel such elation at achieving the greatest desires of our hearts. Boys fantasise playing football for their favourite football club or being a warrior. In our dreams and fantasies, we’re always the goal-scoring hero, the monster-slaying hero that everyone adores. Even in imagining fights or quarrels with our enemies, in our fantasies they are nothing more than fools who get tongue-tied in front of us. We say all the clever things, and the crowd cheers our every sentence. Or, perhaps, fantasising about the girl of your dreams? Courting her is a breeze, she readily accepts when you pop the question, and every date is as sweet as honey or even sweeter, as we would believe it.
In short, everything is perfect in our fantasies. But in pursuing our happiness which we know we will never get, we forget that they are just fantasies. They’re not real. We start to find excuses to mask reality and try convince ourselves that fantasies and/or dreams can come true. We forget that Shrek is just a piece of commercialised feel-good story that we mistakenly worship as an inspirational story for all the imperfect. The Princess and the Frog is just a fable written to entertain children, and yet we cite it as an inspiration to justify our foolish dreams.
In the real world, an ogre will NEVER win the love of a beautiful princess, regardless of whether or not the princess has a curse on her. And let’s face it, would you kiss an ugly, talking frog and believe that he’s a prince, blah, blah, blah? You won’t. I won’t either. The frog would be lucky if i didnt throw it away with all my might. Yet you and I, in all stupidity, still believe we can be that frog in the fable.
At some point in our lives, we try to pursue our dreams and fantasies, urged by the misguided assurance that everything will turn out exactly as we fantasised them. Coupled with the fear of regretting not to have pursued our deepest desires when the chance was there for the taking, we plunge in head-first and find ourselves in the dark world of hurt and dissappointment.
Do we regret what we did then? Yes. Repent? No. Like idiots we cling on to Hope, waiting for a Miracle to happen, for light to shine on us and liberate us from the darkness. Waiting and waiting, stupidly Hoping and secretly believing that our fantasies will still somehow come true and all will end well. "And they lived happily ever after" seems a better thought than rousing ourselves to face up to reality and light our own fires instead of waiting for light from above, light that deep down in our hearts we know will never shine on us yet never had the courage to admit it to be so.
As days passed and we still obstinately cling on to Hope and await a Miracle to happen, despair and anxiety set in. When will it happen? WILL it ever happen? Secretly you and I both know that it will NEVER happen. But to admit that is to admit defeat and accept that our greatest dreams will never be realised.Ever.
While in actual fact we’re wallowing in self-pity and hoping for the suffering to end, for the regrets that we’ve brought for ourselves to just dissappear, we try to appear otherwise. So we continue to console ourselves, telling ourselves to Hope without any real conviction and trying to be Optimistic as we await the Miracle.
Optimism? I now realise it has another name : naivety. Fantasies and dreams are nothing like reality because they can never come true in spite of our best efforts. Hopes and Miracles do occur but they are not for fools like me. Nor are they for those who refuse to believe that the princess wouldn’t have kissed the frog in real life.
For me at least, i should start living and stop daydreaming. Nay, start living and stop dreaming altogether. It’s time to wake up.
January 13th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Nice thought. Not all dreams are unachievable though. Dreams are essential-they are what you envision, what you anticipate and what you really hope will happen to you in the near future. People take dreams as their destiny, something that must be achieved but little did they realize that dreams are the essence of our objectives in life. Objectives that we call…GOALS. Not all goals are not necessary to be fulfilled.