hitch your wagon to a dream and paint the night sky in the boldest colours you know. so that instead of becoming carbon copies of one another, we can celebrate our individual personalities and tastes and differences. and we can all be our own "special" people... "perfect" in our own defined spaces.
fulfilling a parent's dream is far too heavy a burden for any kid to bear. that dream being the by product of years of failures and wrong choices and unhappy coincidences.
so let every parent wave that magic wand of good parenting and declare "my child - go dream and do what you wish. i am here to morally support you, and watch through my proud tears, as your dreams (and not mine) come true".
support outside of the moral kind, of course is redundant. because following one's dream inherently implies one has a universe of talent to boot, and in today's world, where talent is immediately recognised and heralded as this week's great find of the year, why degrade this discussion by bringing up the question of "m-o-n-e-y"?!
except that the rat race is all-pervasive. if it isn't competition for the first place in the race, or in class, or at work, and many times, it has little or nothing to do with the money.
that's when we're competing (perhaps not always knowingly) for contentment.
as long as we live in civilized society, there will always be neighbours and friends. with similar or completely different lives. but for as long as they belong to the same species, we are going to find ourselves invariably comparing - report cards, salaries, gardens, wives/husbands. and while the process of comparing may be quite different from the gory battlefield of competition, the final outcome (of both) is always an unnecessarily long post-mortem of actions and reactions. could've - would've - should've.
comparing is never innocuous. even sharing information can lead to mental cuts and bruises.
so even when the young painter-genius follows his heart's greatest desire (and hence, rescued from the evil incantations of his success-obssessed parents), years and years later, who is to say that he will not be possessed by the same demon-spirit of competition, when a more contemporary school produces a much younger rival? or when his own beautiful wife looks for comfort outside of their marriage? or simply when the rut of his existence (as successful and accomplished as it was) drives him to the point of madness? who is to say which of these might happen? and who is to say, how far he might survive any of it?
are we in a world where we can afford to sit back and let our lives move in neutral? if everything that means anything to us, is fluid - whether it is a dream come true career, or the love of one's life - so much so that even as we hold on to the tangible signs of contentment in our hands, we hold on just a little tighter, just to be sure that they don't wriggle away.
we are competing to get to the top. and if we care to settle for less than that, we're competing just to stay afloat.
this is the rat race, we've been born in, and we will die in - is there really a way out?
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