Follow Your Dream

But watch out for the nuns

By Nury Vittachi

*

Follow your dream. Three times in the past month I have been at talks where I've been told that the most important thing I must do is Follow My Dream.

That's fine, but which dream do I follow? The one where I am naked in the supermarket? Or the one where a giant pre-schooler is chasing me with a cigar-clipper as I wade through a lake of noodles?
*
 I asked my colleague Eddie for advice.

                "I think they mean you should follow your DAYDREAM," he said. "Not the weird dreams you have at night."

                This made it even harder!  How do I arrange to be hotly pursued by a love-struck Scarlett Johansson? Or be tickled to a state of delirium by novitiate nuns?
                Achieving one's full potential is not easy, you know.
*
Anyway, why exactly should one follow one's dream? According to all three speakers, one NEEDS to do so to achieve true happiness.

Well, that's a major downer. I am destined to be miserable all my life. Unless some kind, well-connected reader can give me Scarlett Johansson's email address. (Or has a nun costume.)
*
Hearing about my dilemma, Eddie came up with a good idea: "Why don't you just change your daydream to something easy to achieve? And then you can get ultimate happiness."

                So I decided to spend that morning (I was at a boring business conference) daydreaming that I would have a cappuccino and a slice of carrot cake for lunch.

                I then found a café and purchased a cappuccino and a slice of carrot cake.

                Did I achieve ultimate happiness? Did I heck. I achieved a snack.
*
The fact is, this sort of modern philosophy stinks. Yet people like author Paulo Coelho ("The Alchemist") have made massive fortunes telling people to do this sort of thing.

                What about the downsides, huh? Huh?  Do they tell you about THAT?

                I once knew a lawyer whose fantasy was to be an actor. After more than 10 years as a barrister, he abandoned the law and signed up with the actor's union.

                After "resting" for a few months, he got a job—playing a lawyer. He was stiff and tall, he always dressed in black, and he had a crisp, deep, powerful voice: what else could he play?

                "I'm still striding around a court saying, 'your honour'," he mused.  "The only difference is that I have gone from the most secure, high-paying job in the world, to the least-secure, lowest-paying job in the world."

                But from Mr Coelho's point of view, he'd followed his dream.
*
On the last day of the conference, I was chatting to a young woman and I asked what her husband did. She replied: "Actually, you are living his dream."

                "You mean he wants to be a non-entity napping at a business conference?" I said, astonished.

                "Yes," she replied. "But a non-entity whose novels actually get published."

                Clearly this woman's husband had been talking to Eddie and had decided to aim low on the achievability index.

                "And what's your dream?" I asked.

                "Nothing much, really," she said. "But I would kill for a decent cup of coffee."

                I smiled and pointed at the coffee shop I had discovered earlier. "In that case, I can make your dreams come true," I said. "And manslaughter will not be required."

Comments

[Lindsay Pickles]

When you were chatting to the young woman, why did you ask what her husband did? What was she doing at the business conference? Is her existence only relevant in terms of her husband?

[Mr Jam]

Hi, Lindsay, thanks for your comment. I'm happy to report that I am not a total sexist prat. I already knew what the young woman did, thanks to her presence at the conference. But she was very insistent that I meet her husband, and that led me to ask what he did. It turned out that he had a day job but wrote novels on the side. I ended up telling her that most novelists (and I have met many, some quite famous), do the same as her husband--they have day jobs and write on the side. This cheered her up no end. It meant that whenever he hinted that he should give up work and just focus on his writing, she had some ammunition to put him straight. Until one is massively successful, novel-writing is a better sideline than a main career.

What do you do, Lindsay?

[fardel]

As you may have noticed,after a certain age , one looks back at his/her life;

I was 26,when I had a meeting with one of the bosses,the kind of person everybody in the community was respecting for his values and actions, a very educated, intelligent and very good man :he was about to retire , and I had to report my resignation to him when I chose to "see the world".
I was expecting a lecture, but instead , he started to cry and said, in a trembling voice :”I was your age once, I got married, got children; when the children grew up, we worked hard to have something for our old days with enough money to travel ;
I have a house, a big bank account , a good income but my wife is sick ; we cannot leave the appartment ,and we shall never live our dream.We wasted our lives”
Do not make that mistake! “

It shook me to see this older man cry like a child;

Whatever our philosophy, culture or religion, do we want to reach the end of the travel, regretting we had lived our dreams, or do we want to tell stories of those dreams to our grandchildren?

[Mr Jam]

What a sad story, Fardel. But the fact is, the majority of people don't do crazy things on impulse.

I must admit, even I wanted to settle down in boring London and be a boring office worker when I was in my twenties -- it was my girlfriend who wanted to travel.

So we got married and went travelling on honeymoon. I am now in my 21st year of that honeymoon! Our wedding presents are still in their boxes in London waiting for us to return.

[karuna]

Nury...Nury..The instruction is simple "follow your dreams"..Why are you getting into your complicated mental convulsions.

Now, let's look at your dreams

*** "naked in the supermarket"

-> you could easily do this in any of our supermarkets. and broadcast live on internet. Who knows what will happens next....may be...someone pours sulphric acid from the top floor of the supermarket and Mr. Tsang visits you.......
..just kidding..please spare us from this :))

What I got from Coelho's book Alchemist, where the boy travel from Spain across Arabia only to finally discover the dream that he sought for lies actually where he started from. And in his travel, the boy experiences various wonderful events, which is what life is all about. This is the real truth in the story. The experience and the travel is the real reason for the life.

[Rika]

I can't decide now whether I should feel silly or not - I tell my ladies to chase their dreams!

However, I tell them to start dreaming in the first place. Most of us are digged under by the nitty-gritty bits of life and have completely forgotten what we once wanted to achieve, or what sort of person we wanted to be... and slowly slowly life has taken control over us rather than the other way round.

A lot of those poor pansies like me know only two things: They don't like the life they are living. And they don't have a clue how an alternatie could look like.

In cases like those it makes sense to give this advice of 'following a dream' a shot. If one doesn't know where to start one can as well start with a dream.

If you feel content enough - don't change a thing, by all means - don't even go to silly workshops where they are talking about dreams.

But if you feel like hitting a brick wall wherever you go: Then get the bum up and DO something about it before it is too late. And starting with a dream is as good as anything else.

It worked for me!

[Jan]

Nury, telling everyone you've been on honeymoon for the past 21 years is a fantastic compliment to your wife! Obviously your dreams co-incide....... We've always told our children exactly what fardel suggests : don't get to old age and say 'I wish I'd tried such-and-such a job, or visited such a place etc, I regret not doing it' - take to the road, travel, explore, meet people, and when you're too old to travel you will have wonderful stories to recount to your grandchildren, and the satisfaction of knowing that you didn't just wait for the world to come to your doorstep, you went out to find it for yourself!

[fardel]

Following a dream and doing crazy things on impulse are totally different stories;
I mentioned in a previous comment the story of this 15 year-old boy who came to see me when he heard that I was a flight instructor.He was from a 3 miles wide island and his dreams were nowhere in sight;
He just sent me a picture dated dec 12,2008:the chief pilot of your national airline is giving him his four stripes; He is 33 now, and a Captain on an Airbus A300.
These are the dreams I am talking about, His dream as well as mine, to have left a country, learned a new language , learned to fly, started to teach flying in a new language to unknown “dreamers” who 15 to 20 years later fly the skies of Asia ,South and North America as well as Europe.

In the Sixties, a black man from a racist country was killed for saying in a speech :”I have a dream”
Would have Barack Obama been elected this way, if millions of people had not been inspired by Martin Luther King’s dream.

Who said:"Wisdom is to have a dream so big that you can never lose sight of it" ?
Surely your readers have more stories like those!

[Mr Jam]

Rika, you are definitely right.
We should all definitely take action to achieve great things instead of just drifting through our lives.

Here's a useful analogy i can share from the novel-writing business.
Over the centuries, novelists have realized that the central figure of a novel is not necessary the main good guy; no, it is the person who performs the actions that drive the plot.

Often this is the bad guy (think Richard III, or Darth Vader).

Thus novelists talk not of heroes; instead we use the term protagonist, which means "forward mover".

In reality, I think most of us drift through life most of the time. Things just happen to us. But really we need to switch things around so that we are making things happen.

Incidentally, for anyone interested in literary history, a writer once decided to try an experiment: he wrote a story in which the central character took no actions whatsoever, just for curiosity's sake.

The result was a celebrated oddity which was eventually made into a film: the title was Forrest Gump.

[godiva]

my grandmother said to me a long time ago: "If you dream of becoming a doctor, expect spilled blood. If you dream of an easy life, wake up and don't go back to sleep." I understood her better than Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. Sadly, my grandma did not put the advice on a book.

[Adalina Lo]

Hmm, I can definitely say I'm living my dream. I haven't achieved all my goals or maybe I never will, but at least I know I've tried.

Like I said to a colleague the other day, I would rather live a day full of passion and meaning than a 100 years of mediocrity where I didn't do anything I cared for.

I still believe in following your dreams, but with enough pragmatic steps while also keeping the expectations, good or bad, at a minimum.

While I've been through tons of disappointments and failures, I don't regret any of them. Like everyone else, I've had shattered dreams but they don't control me from following my heart.

I suppose following your heart/instincts is a way better advice than following your dreams. Most people haven't dared to think big really. It takes courage and vision.

The Alchemist is feel-good crap. I hate that shight. Tell the truth. People can take it. Fail but fail gloriously, I'd say.

[Mr Jam]

Have you seen today's Doonesbury cartoon? One guy says he wants to follow his dream and the other guy replies: "Well, dreams are good, Toggle. But you'll need a backup dream."

[Jeevani Fernando]

It is not unfulfilled dreams, but having no dreams at all is the tragedy of life.

[Stevedore]

I want to know what adalina's dream is. i think it is important to follow your dream but i also think the point that Eddie makes about having achievable fantasies is important. Im glad to know that adalina is following her dream, but is it something difficult? or is it have a coffee and a carrot cake as in the original post?

[Adalina Lo]

Hahaha, Stevedore, obviously I have dreams that belong to Nury's ScarJo category which are just so possible to achieve ;)

My dream is simply doing the job I love, even though the money's unpredictable, everything's unpredictable, your conservative relatives are never off your back about stable salaries and so on, etc. It is all very difficult and often times I'm ready to give up at any moment, but at least I tried to do something completely on my own, of my own choice, and just said **** it to all the other opposition out there. That brings great liberation and is the true meaning of freedom IMO - when we just rely on ourselves to make ourselves happy.

OK, when the road is bleak and I just feel utterly depressed about my future, I do just go for achievable, cheap dreams - like the proverbial coffee or carrot cake. If something makes life bearable, why not. As long as you don't end up locked up somewhere.

[Farah]

it sucks when the dream you dream of becomes a dream itself because you are living the dream of someone else.... sad but true!!