“All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”
- William Faulkner
There comes a time in every man’s life when you realize that some of your dreams are just not going to happen. They don’t need to be abandoned, but they do need to be re-shelved under the fantasy section of our brains. I have a nice sized area cordoned off for just those types of things.
Now the difficult part is differentiating between the dreams and the fantasies. The truly hard part is moving the long held dreams up on the fantasy shelf.
Some are hard:
Giving up my baseball dream was very hard and sometimes even today, I’ll think back to what if’s and get a bit sad. Now, I know that the Dodgers will not be calling a 45 year old to tell me to grab my first basemen’s mitt anytime soon. I will never tip my hat after a walk off homer and sadly, the Hall of Fame will not be asking for my bat. So, I have to file that one up on the shelf and I’m good with that. I’ll just look for my home runs in other places.
Some are easy:
Hiking the Appalachian Trail always seemed more glamorous than I am sure it really is and I’m not big on mosquitoes. My feet hurt after ten miles and I really like sleeping in a bed. I realized awhile ago that this was a romantic notion that was fueled by one too many Men’s Journal articles. I like the outdoors, but hiking 2,100 miles over seven months? Thank you, no. I’ve got places to travel, but this will not be one of them.
Some were inevitable:
Even at age fourteen, I knew that I was never going to see Bobby Keller’s Sister naked, but, that did not stop me from dreaming. I dreamed of proms, movies and date nights. Sadly, the fact she was nineteen and I barely fourteen proved to be too much of a hurdle. So, my Cameron Crowe-like fantasy of holding up my boom box or faithfully recreating some John Hughes inspired moment, to sway her affections , in reality was just never going to come. But then again, I doubt that I have missed much and have experienced many much better moments.
And some hurt:
Sometimes the really painful dreams involve second chances. Second chances rarely come; whether they are from past relationships, past lives, past successes or past failures. Those things are said to be in the past for a reason, they are gone. We all have things we would change or things we wish that we would have done differently, but recognizing that the more we live in the past the less that we are living in the now. Now is truly all that we have that is certain. So I need to keep my eyes forward and drive on.
I suppose that the point is this, knowing which things are possible and which things are not can lead you to a greater overall happiness. Sure, I can sit around and pine away for Dodger Blue, but that is clearly not going to happen. So, I need to invest that time accomplishing other dreams.
Now I’m not filing these things away forever. Fantasy time still needs to exist and we need to embrace it. Embracing it is not dwelling on it. There is nothing better on a sleepy Saturday afternoon than nodding off to my little fantasy that I like to call “Jim’s Home run Derby”. But if I let my “failure” to have accomplished all my “dreams” make me a bitter old man, that’s a problem. I refuse to tie my whole life and my daily attitude up with dreams that were actually just fantasies gone unfulfilled.
The key is to know the difference between dreams and reality
and learning how to embrace one…………….
without completely losing the other.
