harmless? bananas!

The one thing that has been on my mind for the past week or so, could be dangerous thought. But I just have to put it down in words, just so I know how ridiculous it sounds, or maybe there might be a grain of truth in what I want to say.

“Kill your dreams, kill them now before somebody gets hurt.”

Okay, how’s that for shock value? I say this in the capacity that.. I don’t particularly think that living your dreams will make you happy, from the inside out at least. Jadedness or weary debacle and throwing in the towel because I don’t always get what I want on my terms and timings? I don’t really know.. but the more I look at it from this particular angle, dreams and ambitions are rather selfish things, and people get hurt in the process of us trying to realise our own ambitions. Also, when we don’t hit the targets we’ve set for ourselves, those dreams get dashed, and we become disillusioned and discontent.

And where there is hurt, discontent and disfranchisement, there is sadness. There is something in unfulfilled dreams that make us struggle more than enjoy what’s in front of us at present.

On the surface, it sounds like I’m telling you to throw in the towel, to aim for nothing so that you can hit something. Accept your lot in life and settle. But if you really know me, there is nothing that makes me sadder, and angrier than when someone loses his of her passion for life and decides to settle.

It’s all abit convoluted I admit, saying something, but meaning the other. But this comes from some rather brash and careful examination and deconstruction of the notion of “dreams”. (Son, when you grow up, you can be whatever you want to be.)

I think there’s hope, and there’s false hope. I think there are notions of personal gratification and comfort that are unrealistic, or at worse, damaging to the world we live in and the relationships we keep. More intimately, we kill ourselves for a dream that stays a dream. I think modern thinking to a degree has made us our own gods, and that it is our right for things to go the way we want them to. Our entitlement, inheritance or what have you. Oh the selfishness of it all.

In the chase of dreams, perhaps a concept introduced to us as far back as the fairy tales of happily ever after, of the protagonist verses the antagonist, good triumphing over evil (or in a post modern context, perceived truths and evils.) But the reality of life just isn’t like the man-made constructs we have of the themes of hope, happiness and triumphs. It is not in our dreams that reality exists, but in our realities that dreams exist.

The concept of dreams has been held in such high regard, that it paints a flawed picture of the reality and struggle that curses us in this mortal realm. It’s two dimensional to put it bluntly. It is also self-serving, and perhaps ultimately self destructive when we keep thinking that the grass is greener on the other side.

So I’m not saying kill your dreams totally by throwing in the towel, quite literally. The atrophy of such behaviour would be the utter stagnation of passion as we know it. A life, not worth living. Quite the contrary, if you’re a fan of my radical (yet utterly inane) notion, is that re-examine what it is that lets you live out your life passionately. Chances are, you won’t find them in some constructed dream you’ve cobbled together from watching too much TV.

Face up to this reality, that life is a struggle, but it is still worth living for. And one of the very first steps is to count all your blessings. We have more than we realise, people, friends, pets, ideas, love, hate, loneliness.. and ultimately, some form of hope. This last part might have been a bit confusing, but it’s a concept rooted in duality. You can’t hate if you’ve never loved. You can’t feel loved if you’ve never been lonely or undeserving of it. You can’t feel rich if you’ve never been poor, you can’t feel healthy if you’ve never been sick. Count your blessings, work.. find solace and joy in the struggle. And one day, I promise you.. it will all end, this mortal curse and blessing all at once.

A fairly resounding day with me presenting to a class of nine, 14 year old students a compact, two hour introduction to making documentaries and some erstwhile tips to surviving the process. It was a lot to condense, and I didn’t have that much time to prepare, but if you can be bothered to look through the presentation, there are links at the end of it that points to the examples I used to highlight what documentaries could be.

After that, it was off to a social gathering organised by my church’s young adults’ network. I thought it was quite a nice gathering from folk, and I caught up with a few leaders who were older than me, and we talked about my decision to start teaching (in September). I suppose it was kind of cathartic for me, and also introspective to listen to the accounts of people who have been there before me.

So there was food, and there were sodas, someone made incredible cheesecakes (that were generous with the crumbly base.) But things really picked up when my friend showed up with his incredible “Horse Head”. If you wear this, you inadvertently turn into Horse Head Man. Here are the pictures:

“To kill a Horse Head Man”

Lens: Helga Viking
Film: Pisitl

“Let all creation sing..”

Lens: Helga Viking
Film: Pistil

“Validation”

Lens: Helga Viking
Film: Pistil

“Nothing to see here”

Lens: Quadcamera

If you would like, you can view the rest of the set here. –> link

And lastly, I was just thinking, before I die, or after I die, I would like to publish all my personal entries into a book entitled “The Published Work Of The Misadventures Of Brian Leery.”

Or something like that.