Dream a Little Dream... Or a Big One

Do you have a "dream"?
Do you even know what that is or what it means?
Is it a dream or a fantasy?
Yeah, I want to make a difference between those things.

But first:

I've been doing this a while, now, the whole author thing and, with it, the blog thing. I've changed the way I blog since way back in the beginning when I used a lot of my time to go and search out other blogs and be very interactive in the whole blogging process. It's time consuming, and I got to a point where I had to ask the question about what my dream was: Was it to write or was it to blog? But that's beside the point, though worth noting. The short of that was that I changed the way I blog, and I no longer go out searching for new blogs by other authors to get involved with.

The point of me telling you that is that I want to note how few blogs show up in my blog feed each day, now. Back when I was being heavily involved in blogging, there would be dozens of blog posts in my feed each day. It was seriously difficult to keep up with. When I changed the way I blogged, I didn't stop following people (even if I did stop visiting all of them), so all of those posts still showed up in my feed each day. Now, though, today, there were only two new posts in my feed. Monday, the heaviest day of the week, there were only eight, and there were none from Saturday and Sunday. [All of these numbers are as I write this on Tuesday, August 16.] Days without posts used to never happen. Never.

Sure, some of the missing people moved onto other platforms (InstaTwitter or whatever), but many of them just gave up on writing. Probably most of them. Okay, actually very certainly most of them. If I go down my list of people who no longer blog, most of them no longer do anything. They just quit.

And that is because of the difference between a dream and a fantasy.

For our purposes, we're going to call a "dream" something you yourself can accomplish.
We're going to call a "fantasy" something that happens to you.

So you can have a dream of buying lottery tickets, but any thoughts of winning the lottery are fantasies. Winning the lottery is not something you can achieve; it can only happen to you. Likewise, you can have a dream of being a writer (because you can sit down and do that), but you can only have a fantasy about being a rich and famous writer. You can be the best writer in the world and never become rich and famous because, as with the lottery, that is mostly luck. Maybe completely.

The problem is that it's easy to subvert your dream with the fantasy. Those things can be easy to confuse. When you believe your dream is the fantasy, you can become disillusioned. I know of several writers who quit, just gave up on it, because, after publishing a couple of things, they didn't become household names. It was crushing to them, and they just quit writing. They had a fantasy of becoming rich and famous and allowed it to take the place  of their dream. That's a dangerous thing, allowing your fantasy to squash your dreams.

How do you deal with that kind of thing?

Well, the first way is to identify your dream and recognize the fantasy for what it is.

However, it is perfectly reasonable to have a dream of being "rich," but you need to identify that as your dream. Your actual dream. If that is your dream, you need to choose a path that enables you to work toward that as a dream and, let me just say, writing is a poor path to riches. Pun totally intended. You could even choose fame as a dream, I suppose, although fame is a very elusive thing, and you need to find avenues that lead to that more readily than writing. I would suggest giving Will Smith a call. Evidently, he followed a very specific plan to get to where he was in the 90s.

Now, I want to take all of this back a step farther: What is your real dream? I mean, writing is my dream, but there is a deeper dream, Let's call the dream the "deep magic," but there is a "deeper magic," the thing that supports the dream. That dream for me is the dream of leaving something behind. Something lasting. Something for my kids but also something that goes beyond just them and, in one way or another, everything I have done in my life has worked toward that.

Let me put it another way:

My grandfather was a great man. I'm going to go into why that is because 1. it would take too long and 2. it's unnecessary to what I'm going to say. He was a great man but, once I and the rest of his grandchildren are dead, there will be nothing left of him. Nothing beyond a notation in a genealogy file somewhere. And a birth certificate. Nothing that anyone will ever take note of in the future. Even the farm he poured his sweat into and the house he helped build are all gone now, burned to nothing in the wild fires that swept through East Texas a few years ago.

I don't know what kinds of dreams my grandfather had; he was more than a little laconic. But it makes me sad that he will be forgotten one day. I want to leave something behind, and my writing serves that dream.

It's not that I have a dream of being the Shakespeare of the age. Or, even, the Tolkien. Or, even, the Lewis. But I would be more than happy with being a MacDonald. See, you people don't even know who that is, do you? Here, I'll help: George MacDonald. See, it doesn't matter how unheard of he is for the most part, because his books are still out there and he still influences people. Probably in more ways than we can even imagine.

So, yeah, I choose the dream of writing to fulfill the dream of leaving something behind that lasts. And, well, if fame and riches follow, well, that's a nice fantasy, but it has nothing to do with my dream.

So what is your dream? Is it small or is it big? And can you separate it from fantasy?




"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.

The Philosophy of Change (Change: part 1)

On the whole, people don't much get along well with "change." Most of us just don't like it. Change is something to be fought against and conquered, not embraced. Change is the enemy.
To most of us.

To be honest, I am one of those "most of us." I do well with routine. I don't get bored easily. I'm not always looking for the "next, new thing" or anything like that. However, I am not necessarily averse to change; I just forget about it. Forget about doing it.

That's really the core of the issue with change: For most of us, change is something that happens to us, not something that we instigate. We become victims of change, and that is really the thing we don't like. That and things are different afterwards. Most of us would rather bad things stay the way they are than risk any kind of change. Change could, after all, make things worse.

But let me remind everyone of Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different (or better) result.

Look, I am fairly anti-tradition, mostly because tradition is the antithesis of change. Being locked into tradition (or doing something the same way) for the sake of the tradition (or doing something the same way) has always been (well, since middle school, anyway (yes, "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson had a huge impact on me)) mostly foolish in my eyes. Tradition (or doing something the same way) should always be evaluated to see what purpose it's performing and held up against the purpose it's supposed to be performing. For instance, Christmas gatherings are supposed to be joyous and fun occasions but, if gathering with your family doesn't not meet that goal (like if it's a thing you dread every year but do anyway because of tradition) then you shouldn't do it. That's a bad tradition. But I digress...
(And, no, I am not talking about my family with that example. It's just a thing you see a lot of at the time of year we just came through (that being Christmas (as I'm writing this)).)

So...

A thing I try to do every so often in my life is to look at the things I'm doing to see if they are meeting the goals they are supposed to be meeting. I don't want to be one of those people who just keeps doing the same thing, only harder, over and over and hoping for a different result.

Now, before I go on, I need to say a few things:
1. My wife says that I missed my window for writing this post, especially since it's not going to post until some time in February.
2. I disagree with my wife because, as I write this, it is technically (and by "technically" I mean that it is (by almost a week)) still January, and this kind of thing can be done any time during January. (Traditionally (heh heh))
3. My wife says this post (series of posts) is for me. You can read it, but it's not for you. I think I agree with that. This place has become a good one for sort of keeping track of what I'm doing in my life at any given moment, so it will help me remember the changes that took place last year, a year of more than the normal amount of changes. Remember, I sometimes (frequently) forget to make them, so there aren't always changes. At least not ones initiated by me.
4. If you choose to read it... well, I hope it's helpful in some way, but it's not meant to be. I'm just putting out there what happened and, probably, some context so that it's understandable.

All of that said, 2015 started out with change. I spent the last month or two of 2014 looking at where I was and what I was doing and deciding on what things were working and what things weren't. So January of 2015 started with change.
But I guess we'll get to that next time.