At some point, the questions people have been asking you since you were young—particularly, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”—no longer get asked. Does that mean you’ve grown up? Not necessarily. But those questions begin to implicate the present; unless you are one of the few who are as certain of what you want to be as you were when you were six—and are equipped to make it happen—you realize, whether or not you have any dreams that have lasted, you are the only one that will make anything like a dream really happen.
But you also realize there is an objective, solid (or at least semi-solid) outside world within which your dream will or will not be realized. It may be that one’s twenties are spent trying to learn the rules of that world and how her or she fits in with it. Perhaps that’s why it’s a chapter in the story that tends to get skimmed or even skipped.
I am abundantly convinced that, however clichéd it may sound, it is critically important to keep your dreams alive. I think it is only slightly less important to realize they will almost certainly never happen in the way you dream they will. But a young adult who still knows how to dream is way better off than one who is too cynical and disillusioned to have any hope for the future.
Both of the perspectives I just mentioned—the dreamer and the realist—I think are necessary, and I think there is a way to keep both of them intact by figuring out how they relate to each other: the dreamer needs to be tempered by the realist, just as the cynic needs to be animated, and perhaps softened, by hope.
As I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to think the best way to look at this is to treat them both as dreams—that is, to realize that you always have at least two dreams in play. The first should be the easiest to recognize, but may not be, depending on how far away you are from your childhood: it is the astronaut, the rock star, the visionary author (or in my case, both of the latter two)—whatever you would have answered at age six when asked the familiar question of what you want to be when you grow up. The second dream is roughly the same for everyone, and it is rarely called into consciousness till you’re older. I think coming out of adolescence is in part a process of realizing how important it is: the dream to be real, to live grounded in reality, to have a life that is solid and reliable and that makes sense.
The loftier your Dream #1 is, the more Dream #2 tends to look like a mere negation. It will come to you couched in a sentence that starts with the word “But” and ends in dashing your hopes against the rocks. That, I want to suggest, is not the only way to approach the necessary task of relating these two dreams. They can be integrated. But it takes work and it takes help.
You have to realize that no matter how outlandish your first dream is, it is a huge “clue” (as Katie would say) to what you ought to do with your life. There is something valid and necessary at its core; there is something there that you are after; there is something in it that you really ought to pursue.
We dream mostly in images, and only the most creative among us can dream in images we’ve never seen before. So someone says he wants to be an astronaut. He thinks that’s what he’s after because, out of everything that he’s seen, it is the role, the career, maybe the action figure that most embodies the much less tangible, the much more amorphous and elusive thing he really wants.
Depending on how old and “mature” he is, he has a greater or lesser sense of what it would actually take to make that dream happen, on the one hand, and a greater or lesser sense of the gritty reality of what that dream would demand of him were he actually able to realize it. No kid who dreams of being an astronaut is dreaming of the years of exhausting schooling and training, on the one hand, or the rote, monotonous drudgery that (I assume) fills up the vast expanses of time every astronaut spends not being in space.
But as the second dream grows in prominence—the dream to be real; the dream to have a real, adult life—it becomes a matter of letting the first dream, in all its particularity and naïveté, die, for a moment, and be reborn in a world governed by the laws of reality.
I have come to believe, as I said, that at the core of every dream, even the most outlandish, there is something there worth saving and pursuing with everything you’ve got. The shell is what needs to go, and it’s not easy to let it go. It takes something like faith to know that when you let go of the particular form of the dream you’ve grown accustomed to, there will still be something there, something you really want, and something that you can pursue as a goal and finally get to.
To be continued...
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