"If you trust in yourself and believe in your dreams and follow your star you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy." ~Terry Pratchett
One of the things Kat and I enjoy most in the world is visiting America’s National Parks. We have had the great fortune to see Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Glacier, Teton, and of course Smoky Mountain. Later this summer we are going to visit Yosemite. We often take the time on these trips to do a guided rafting trip, kayak, or horseback ride.
Obviously the beauty, the wild, and the sheer bigness that surrounds you on one of those trips inspires whimsical thoughts of what life could have been like if only. Man has always been enthralled with the wild which is exactly why our best President ever, Mr. Teddy “I Killed Bears With My Bare Hands” Roosevelt” created the first National Park. When you get away from “life” it makes you understand how much better the simple life is.
One other thing about these trips that always sends me down “hypothetical alternate life road” other than the wilderness is the people who guide these tours. Sometimes they are 20-something kids taking a break after college, sometimes they are hippies who somehow managed to find the one job in America they have the capacity to keep, and sometimes they are just crazy ladies with awkwardly long hair. But they all have two things in common.
1. They make you feel incredibly bad for being a part of typical American society and not doing what you really enjoy. 2. They are poor. I’m talking communal living in a tent kind of poor.
I’ll admit I always leave these rafting/kayaking/horseback riding trips feeling sad that I didn’t chase my dreams. Now, let me say here that I am not complaining. I actually feel that I did follow one of my dreams. Working with my dad and brother for a company my parents own and getting to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for our incredible community is an amazing blessing and it was one of my dreams. But, it was my “tame” dream not my “wiId” dream. All of us of our “wild” dreams. Travel the world, take part in the Running of the Bulls, hit a grand slam in the World Series, eat at every single Cheesecake Factory in the entire world. So, if I had felt one of my “wild” dreams was possible would have I chosen my “tame” dream?
Doubtful.
So, why do most of us chose our “tame” dream? Two reasons. First is money. While I would love to raise wolves for a living I also love things like food, water, clothing, shelter, and even love. Often our wildest dreams don’t involve making much scratch and scratch is needed to survive and truthfully it makes being happier a tad bit easier.
People often try and get on their high horse and say that money doesn’t matter, but it does. We can’t all follow our wildest dreams. If so there would be no food, because not many people dream of doing back breaking work all day while farming. There would be no medical care because people become doctors at least partly for the cash or else our trips to the doctor would be a lot less expensive.
We can’t all follow our dreams. Money matters.
But maybe that is just an excuse. Maybe we can’t ALL follow our dreams, but I can. Then there comes the issue of maybe we aren’t all capable of achieving our dreams. Dreams take more than a go get ‘em attitude. All the little boys in America can’t grow up to play basketball in the NBA. Why not? Because the average height in America for men is 5’10”. All the little girls can’t grow up to be actresses or Pop stars. Why not? Around 31% of American kids are obese.
So, even if I decided that money doesn’t matter and I should follow my WILDEST dream I am still in a world of hurt because my wildest dream happens to be to become a famous author. You don’t become a famous author because you want it really bad or because you sit through some creative writing workshops. You become a famous author because you have natural talent, work to to hone that talent, happen to come up with a new and fresh idea for a book, and then get lucky.
Let’s just pretend that I am not a shallow person and money didn’t matter at all to me and I was willing to live a life being a “starving artist” before I finally broke it big with the next American classic. The issue then becomes just because I am willing to do something doesn’t mean I am able. I am going to leave you with an excerpt for the Dennis Lehane novel “Gone Baby Gone” and the from one of my blog posts entitled, “Nutz” and I think this will be better prove than the rest of my article on why some of us should not follow our wildest dreams.
“Nothing smells so clean and cold and promising as quarry water. I’m not sure why this is, because it’s merely decades of rain piled up between walls of granite and fed and freshened by underground springs, but the moment the scent found my nostrils, I was sixteen again and I could feel the plunge in my chest as I jumped over the edge of Heaven’s Peak, a seventy-foot cliff in Swingle’s Quarry saw the light-green water yawn open below me like a waiting hand, felt the weightless and bodiless and pure spirit hanging in the empty, awesome air around me. The I dropped, and the air turned into a tornado shooting straight up from the advancing pool of green, and the graffiti exploded from the shelves and walls and cliffs around me, burst forth in reds and blacks and golds and blues, and I could smell that clean, cold, and suddenly frightening odor of a century’s raindrops just before I hit the water, toes pointed down, wrists tucked tight against my hips, dropped deep below the surface where the cars and the refrigerators and the bodies lay.” Dennis Lehane
VS.
“Movies come out every week that contain a female baring her breasts to anyone willing to go to the local theater and spend a small fortune on a ticket and popcorn. When a movie decides to include a nude man the media acts like they are killing babies in the film. Look up Forgetting Sarah Marshall controversy on google, it's all about the male goods. Borat was known for being a jew hating racist, but most of the controversy for the film came from the male nudity. Eastern Promises was one of the best films to come out in 2007 but was often referred to as "The Weiner Fight movie" Male genitalia is offensive, plain and simple. Nutz serve no purpose, make the driver look like a tool, and offend everyone except other tool bags.” Brandon Jones
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