Live Your Dream: Nobody Can Live It for You
The fear of success and the fear of failure are two sides of the same coin; fortunately clarity and perseverance are its antidotes.
We can all recall Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”, one of the most powerful political speeches of our time. It is partly because of him that dreams, as a notion, have unequivocally established themselves as a horizon of change. This has nothing to do with “daydreams”, which some consider as mere distractions, nor is it related to the make believe, or to a false and fashionable optimism: this means building a new vision of our life and teaching us to live in sync with it.
While agents of change, rebels and dreamers from different periods can show us the paths that enable us to create these visions, they cannot make us live them. No religious leader, be it Jesus or Buddha, and no political thinker, be it Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, or pacifist icons like Gandhi or John Lennon can make us change the way we live by an iota if we do not live in accordance with our own vision: dreamers can teach us to dream, but nobody can dream another person’s dream. That is the wonder of reveries: they are non-transferrable. There are, however, two basic fears that prevent us from seeing our dreams through: fear of failure and fear of success.
The first implies that our vision remains subordinate to the approval of others. That our personal code of law still requires permission to do what we truly desire. This has a lot to do with fear of the unknown. However, failure can be tamed if we learn how to hack it; if we understand how it works and thus learn that it can be intervened. Our vision can encounter unexpected delays, obstacles and setbacks, but if it is strong enough it will learn how to use these delays to its advantage, and it will even transform them into time well spent. We only fail when we give up on our dream, and giving up is a choice we make every single moment.
Fear of success is the latter’s counterpart: success is not a socially programmed goal, nor is it a series of parameters we have to reach. Our success can only be measured on our own terms, the terms of our vision. We may find ourselves thinking: Okay, I will follow my dreams, but once I get there, what comes next? There is no way of knowing. But if our vision is strong and ample enough, it will bring us much more than mere personal satisfaction; it will continue to motivate us and it will suggest new routes, it will lead us to new places and people, it will be ultimately our life and our life will be our dream.
With this in mind, the only thing we have to remember is: yielding to a dream implies giving a leap of faith over and over again, every single day of our lives. Choosing to be congruent with our dreams; to come to terms with their contradictions no matter what happens, will keep us afloat on the ever-changing sea.
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