Do you daydream?
It seems like years since I have actually sat down, maybe looked at the clouds, and let my mind wander into the never-ever world of daydreams.
I suspect it may be a childhood preoccupation, a time when everything possible remained just that — possible.
With age, there must be a hardening of the dreamscape artery. With age, life fills up with a reality that puts you in situations, puts you in places or experiences that define so much of who we are, and the daydream world seems to suffer as a result. The possible still exists, of course, but we tend to acquiesce to the probable. Every choice we make in life seems to logically move to another choice. We rarely step off the beaten and certain path. We rarely take flight.
A child looks at the world much differently from how an adult looks at the world. That innocent and wide-eyed wonder of creation changes as we grow older and somehow becomes a narrow view of what we must do to survive. Things get in the way. Circumstances weigh on our minds. Other people bog us down with expectations and demands. Fanciful dreaming becomes counterproductive, and we trade in our daydreams for some kind of certainty, some kind of need for measurable results in almost everything we do.
Steve Jobs, the philosopher king behind the Apple® line of electronic products, always encouraged his staff to "dream big." He encouraged people to make the impossible possible, to make what seemed beyond the scope of practicality a reasonable target to which to aspire.
The world needs more daydreamers, men and women who look at life a little differently and who explore the limits of their imaginations and beyond.
This is not to say that we should forego our daily responsibilities and drift aimlessly in a kind of euphoric world of fantasy. What we might do, however, is see the world more as a child does, look at the clouds in the sky and see tigers and dragons, rocket ships and submarines, gremlins and gargoyles.
We need to open our eyes to differences and not be blinded by sameness. With that comes an ability to see experiences and other people as so completely unique that our expectations of the commonplace become revelations of the extraordinary.
