Last week I had a long, late-night phone call with a friend. She called, she said, because she wanted to help calm down my racing mind at the end of a long day – which worked for the first thirty minutes or so, but soon had me unearthing memories and thoughts I had left unturned for years.
The overarching theme of those mulling-overs could be summed up, I suppose, in the word “maturity” and what it looks like as a process, as a part of becoming a person.
The underwhelming thought was whether it could be defined – or if a definition was useful to begin with.
See, the same things for which I was labled a “problem child” or rebel or heretic within certain contexts are the very things I am praised and loved for in another. This is true, I think, for pretty much everyone, though shades of style, timing, and intensity vary. Mine happens to be a relentless drive for discovery. Keen, intense curiosity over every last detail of every last niche in most fields. Questions that breed only more questions; answers that satisfy briefly, but never fulfil. A spirit that cries “Let me try! Let me try!” at every turn, every new thought, every idea. A mind and body that scoffs at risk, time, and pain being presented as reasons to not pursue elusive tigers on snowy mountains for months and years on end.
This, along with a hyperactive, intense-but-quickshifting mind, results in dreams, business plans, travel itineraries, lifestyle designs, and career adjustments flooding my brain every day or so. When caught up in the “high” of a thrilling thought, a dream that is just within reach, an audacious goal that has to be attempted at least once, or a business plan that promises both joy and riches, I do not see reality the same way the people around me do. I simply do not. I am blind to unwashed dishes, missed work deadlines, a lost turtle, every last carefully-tailored warning telling me it is a bad idea. I see naught but the vision already reached. All else are secondary — sleep, meals, my reputation, the budget, the consequences of this act on the non-existent future. Sometimes, the pursuit and realization of this vision becomes my identity. If you stand against it, you therefore stand against me, and so I fight you.
It drove my parents crazy, I told my friend. I would cook ramen at 4am if I woke up hungry at 3am or stayed up all night reading, studying, planning, dreaming. I would ask them questions they have never thought were things to be asked or attempted, and demand an answer within a week (timing of certain opportunities can be tight). I would think aloud and outline how this could be used, how that business model works within this given market and why it would fail or succeed, what my siblings could consider as income-sources and skills-training instead of finding an average summer job, what this tweak and that mindset could do for a life lived with a bowed head.
Some ideas were shot down on the spot. Some I brought to fruition in private. Some I had to disguise in broad daylight. Some I was allowed to work on until the last ten percent, then cut off. Many failed. A handful could be considered partial successes.
The tens of thousands of dollars, the thousands of hours, the scorn, the checkered reputation — was it worth it? my friend asks.
I bought an old trailer some years ago, and worked towards remodeling it into a tiny home. Two years later, I gave it away. To this day, loved ones say to me: “If only you have not done that, you would be further on in your life right now. At least you would have savings worth looking at. If you had only been more thoughtful, done more research, and known more about what you were getting yourself into, you would not have had to go through all that headache. And what do you have to show for it?” Years afterwards, this endeavor still stands before them as proof of my stupidity and impulsiveness, my tendency to chase dreams while throwing common sense out the window.
And yet, when I think about it, I would not have done anything differently. Nor would I want to erase or undo that experience (and the half-dozen similar experiments I have run since).
No, it was not a success. No, I never slept a night in it. No, they were right — externally it was truly all a waste. All of it.
And even while I would agree that it was somewhat ill-informed, driven more by daydreams than carefully-researched calculations, somehow I am still incapable of seeing what I “did wrong.”
What I see I could improve in, however, is in this direct and simple admonition: Stop doing the things you know you should not be doing. First put your house in order before you change the world. The quality of your current life — the level of clear intention, the beliefs and values your actions demonstrate, the way you make decisions and choose what to overlook, the amount of dust and mold you tolerate in your immediate living spaces — that quality will be reflected in the same vision now shining in spotless perfection in your mind. Who you are does not change that much in a different environment, a different relationship, or a new milestone reached. At what point do you make snap decisions? What do you no longer tolerate? How much tension between your loved ones and yourself are you willing to live within as you chase this dream? Clear up the debris before building.
That last question is a tough one to accept as necessary, but at times it is crucial. It points towards the second lesson I learned: Reduce (and hopefully eliminate) pressure and stress of said goals on people who do not believe in them. Paying for my dreams out of my own pocket has been a principle of my life since my first business at age nine — aside from the odd friend or family member who believed in the value of my pursuit and thought it worth investing in. The costs are mine to pay, as are the consequences. Not only do I not ask or expect anyone to support me unless they do so of their own volition (through their observation of the things I do, let us say), I do what I can to make additional support unnecessary for the dream to be realized.
There is a need, too, to be careful how closely one allows people into the inner recesses of their mind. Third lesson: Words break minds and intentions — over time, mindsets and imposed beliefs erode at even the most fervently held beliefs. When you spend early mornings and late nights building businesses, crafting opportunities, and creating wealth, but live with people who complain about the lousy jobs they have, compare notes on how they would blow their money on fun weekends, and are complacently comfortable doing nothing to better anything and anyone, it makes you start to question yourself. Even if you do not agree with them or try to laugh off their comments, it is friction that influences you. You must spend energy fighting laziness, apathy, unwanted social invitations, and all the other things that come with swimming upstream — energy and attention that could be spent on something else more impactful. So, be careful. Watch who gets inside your head uninvited.
There is something to be said about blooming where you are planted, but you have legs instead of roots for a reason.
The fourth lesson the stories I lived have taught me was this: Belief in a clear vision thoroughly understood is not enough — you must work to understand reality as it is, to know how and what and when to bend what is often taken for granted, and learn to do so. To make a dream worthwhile and real, it must engage with the real world as itself — as honestly, vividly, clearly as it could be made into being. Do not doubt the vision, the ideals it reached for, and the beauty and goodness you know and trust it would bring into the world (once the vision has been purified and carefully mulled over, that is), sure. But that belief is only one side of the coin — the other side is reality itself. Do stuff, figure out systems and cause-effect loops, and experiment, observe, learn.
Which brings me to the fifth lesson: It is not wrong to feel intensely, to roar like a lion at yourself or at the world, to dance for the sheer wonder of being alive. It is not a sin to dream in technicolor and bold lines, to believe in things that do not yet exist, to jump off a cliff when you know you might just fly. It is not evil to trust in ideas no one around you has thought of before, to see value and beauty in things people toss into trashcans, to care about gradients and nuances of textures and colors when others just want to get it over with. It is not wrong to do every damn thing you could to live out what only you are. Even when there are a thousand reasons to not care, to give up, to choose the easier path, it does not mean you must die if you choose to play differently. The people, the voices, and the situations around you may say otherwise — they see your resilience as mulish stubbornness, your single-minded focus as closemindedness, the fervor and intensity of your beliefs as a blinding, out-of-control and destructive fire. But shift the game, adjust the rules, and change the ending — that is not the only place you can present what you do and be who you are.
The tension might be no more than misalignment, an apple judging an orange for its lack of appleness, the abnormalities of a pure white swan when compared to colorful ducks, gazelles laughing at the size and weight of a lion brought up among them as one of them. That tension can kill, clarify, transform, or empower different aspects of the particular blend of capabilities and strengths you bring. The more you are aware of how you are being molded by the worlds that brush up against yours, as well as how you mold those other worlds, the more precisely you can tailor the versions of yourself (and the intensity and depth of each version) to the far-ranging fields, situations, relationships, and projects you engage in. See, the same stubborn “let me do it my way” teachers and parents coax and threaten out of you by turn is what makes creating art meaningful and sustainable — it allows you to make the journey to creative mastery deeply personal while differentiating your work from that of other artists, leading to (in theory, at least) a well-rounded and satisfying pursuit.
When the voices get too loud and become too consistent, when your environment is such that it takes too much from your soul to maintain a baseline of self-respect at the end of each day, when you cannot see your dreams for the mountains of debt and fear that tower over you in the valley of discouragement, when you begin to wonder if there really is something you are missing that everyone else is on to and somehow you are disabled simply by the way you operate and see the world, when the hand in which you hold the anthem of your existence begins to shake in the cold bitter air, when physical death is nothing in light of a life lived in the grayness of not trying and yet you feel doomed to such a life, when a misty fog begins to fall over the vivid clarity of your dreams and you wonder if they really meant anything in the first place, you realize the power of context in the application of a human being happening to reality.
You are what you eat, says the doctor. Your mind is what you feed your eyes and ears, says the psychologist. From your heart flows all the issues of life, says the Preacher. Your soul is found in the things you create and the moments you lose yourself in, says the artist.
Your dreams are the world that exists in the parts of you beyond what your mind knows and your eyes can see, says I.
Despite the humdrumness of everyday life and the troubles of eating, drinking, working, and sleeping, we refuse to cease dreaming, the visionaries among us. Dreams drive us mad; not having a pursuit makes us insane. But time, struggles, and the ever-changing nature of worlds external and integral teach us yet another lesson. There is never an “ultimate” dream that would make all our past failures and current pain worth it. There is no “salvation” for our shortcomings and the dreams that have burned and drowned in a thousands different ways — sometimes by our own hands. There is no sense of “This is it, I have reached the end of my struggles,” for as great work begets more work, each dream leads to ever greater dreams. There is no control over what happens in the last chapters of a journey, no foreknowledge of the ways our selves evolve over the time it takes to walk a single path, no ability to tell a dream to wait and keep itself alive until we can nurture and love it into the world.
Back then I was in the business of gathering stories worth retelling, I told my friend. Not necessarily trying to get ahead, save up for the future, speak my lines of the script, or figure out what to do with my life. Not everything I did in life amounted to a lesson I could form into little balls of words and bake into tasty, marketable lesson-bites. Neither did I share my dreams for profit, or shock value, or for something to brag about to friends and family. I had a vision; I cared about it; I decided I was willing to do what it takes to try and make it real. That was all.
And yes, I learned these lessons the hard way. I drove stress and misunderstandings deep into relationships with family members because I refused to compromise, or wait, or to first organize my life before building more into it. I realized how much I liked myself did not change no matter what I achieved or what my life looked like on paper. I stayed up more nights than was good for my health when dreams became obsessions that stole my attention from other meaningful things. I “staged” way too many projects and goals in an effort to gain support and feel understood, to not feel like an outcast. I let myself get drunk on the perfection of visions in my head without testing them against reality and letting real costs and consequences show me what I must pay to make it real.
Still now, I take more risks than is generally advisable; I demand of my soul and mind more than is strictly necessary; and I am still kept awake at night, sometimes, by thoughts that grip me, give me goosebumps, and fill my heart to overflowing. I do dream. Madly. But I have learned some things about being a visionary — and they do not necessarily have to do with my intelligence or smartness, or my maturity level, or with whether I am right or wrong in existing as I do, as a curious dreamer thrilled by existence and just “doing things.”
…Or is the sum of these lessons — and the one or two other that insist on slipping away from me as I write this — the very framework of maturity itself?
I see them not as “this is how you become a grown human being” but as “this is how to keep your inner child alive without living a more painful life than you absolutely must.”
“To dream and not make dreams your master,” as Kipling said. These little lessons are some of my ways to continue dreaming and thinking without making thoughts my aim and living a life driven entirely by devotions to castles in the skies of my mind.
Each of these lessons on their own feel small and normal, a trite nod to clichéd self-help and productivity tips. Cleaning your mind, habits, and room first. Misunderstanding, loneliness, and lack of support as expected costs to pay. The work of reducing ignorance and understanding reality as foundational. Learning to understand yourself apart from the judgements — moral or value-based — of others on the things that form your make-up. To continue to feel and care, sometimes to the point of madness and overwhelming passion. Adjusting rules, games, and environments until the context fits. Loving people around you without letting them make you hate yourself.
Together they form a blueprint for the pursuit itself to be beyond reproach, for a dreamer to create without scraping a bow at every turn to critics, for a dream to have meant and been made worth more than odd combinations of neurons bumping into each other past bedtime. There is understanding of the cost and a willingness to pay it in the full; there is responsibility in first forming a foundation from which to build; there is awareness of reality and the need to engage with it, even as one seeks to bend the world to their vision; there is love and appreciation for those in one’s life even if they do not agree, respect, or support the pursuit; there is courage to carry on loving and hating and being joyful when all else tempts one to be apathetic.
Dreams do not die easily when there is a structure built to nurture them so that they grow and challenge them so that they know they should, and could.
So no, I did not accomplish what I wanted to with the dreams I chased in the past, nor could I take back what I have poured into “failures” to put myself into a better position today, nor could I recover the energy and focus I had spent on defending, explaining, and adjusting my pursuits to people who did not care. But there is nothing I regret in learning who I am and what I do the hard way every time — this journey has brought me clarity, joy, memories, and far more life than any retirement fund, social status symbol, or public applause could bring me.
All I could do is my best, and give my all to things and people I care about.
That was what I did, imperfectly.
That is still what I do today, still imperfectly.