Don't follow dreams, chase them

My coffee’s steaming. The mist clouds some damp on my wall mirror and rains back onto my study desk. It’s such a spectacle for an idle mind. I know the charm and poetry of quiet nights when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or indulge your mind with dreams. I look into the future as into the eyes of my own mother. I subconsciously draw a heart; tracing it on the damp with my index finger. Then I drift away.

A commotion on the headboard jolts me back to my senses. A light-skinned lizard silently stalks a spider while cunningly closing up towards her. Every home has this type. The one that’s more of a family member; they never move, won’t hurt but everyone hates them. I don’t know what to feel about this.

I’m a fan of Spiderman; not spiders. I don’t fancy reptiles since serpents fall in that category. I just sit, mask the sentimental me by pulling an emotionless face and watch as the spider realizes it’s the target meal, dashes along the headboard to the bedpost and crosses to my desk along the Ethernet cable with a four-legged beast in hot pursuit. Action halts with an unhappy ending. Meal is caught right at the centre of my ‘heart’; gobbled up in delirious feat and I simply admire the hunter licking lips in acknowledgement of beautiful role-playing in the drama. Then it looks around for more spiders. The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny. The lizard brain only wants to eat, mate and be safe. Lizards have not been known to achieve satiety just like man.

That beastly allusion is portrayal of the humanoid culture. Life is always chase-this-chase-that. From the abstract dreams, goals, success, identity, freedom and destiny to the physical like food, mates and money; we are always up and about beating someone or something to it. It’s our instincts to chase that which is going away and to run away from that which is chasing us.

We wake up early and chase time to beat morning traffic snarl-ups and stay up late to beat deadlines while chasing that long overdue promotion and its hefty perks. It’s all about chasing and being chased in the dating world. Of course, we chase visions not people. It’s when we don’t see anything to chase in a person that they become of no value.

 Survival for the fittest has become cliché since even the fittest struggles to survive in a food chain that is part of a greater food web. While the learning curve leans upwards with every pursuit; the satiety curve goes down. We’re never full. Gratitude shows us we’ve had enough but only for the while. If you follow your dreams, you won’t catch them. Chase them, make them pant for breathe and sap the life out of them.

That is what success means. It’s not how much we achieve but more of how much we are sacrificing and doing towards what we achieve. And mostly it is the means that wins admiration. Achievement, like beauty, is relative. There is always more and better.

 

Ever heard of a successful enterprise? It narrows down to an entrepreneur who is never satisfied and wants to chase the next big thing in his endeavors. Gets new things done every day with new ways of doing it. Heard of successful relationships? It’s about winning each other every day. And that never seems to happen because how I’ll win you tomorrow is a greater and better win than today’s win. It feels happier and fulfilling tomorrow. That is what drives the lot we term ‘successful’ among us. Successful parenting never stops while you’re alive. Just like a successful life, one that leave legacy even when one is gone – not necessarily dead. Such a life imparts and impacts on others.

Inside every old person is a young person wondering, ‘What happened?’-Because there is never enough time for everything. The lizard brain is the reason you’re afraid and also the source of your resistance.

Legacy normally sounds political until it hits you that you have grown old and yet to make one. Does what we do leave some building ground for top up? Now that’s legacy. You can’t leave footprints on the sands of time when sited. It is those that are always on the run that build legacy. You only have to choose what to chase.

See now why it has always been a man-eat-man society even before we knew ‘gay’? Use others as stepping stones and be one too. Let’s despise our unruly selfishness. Like building blocks, we’ll always need each other.