We're all prone to wishing. It's a perfectly natural pastime.
We wish for health, we wish for prosperity, we wish for peace, we wish for love, and we even wish that someone else's wishes all come true.
It's a cool feeling.
For a few moments, you turn your imagination loose, and really, you can come up with almost anything.
Now, the BIG question is: "How do we make our wishes come true?"
Too often, we wish and wish and wish, but we never get what we wished for. Bit of a bummer that.
I guess some of our wishes are too far out there in the realm of fantasy. I mean, you could wish to lose 50 pounds, like by tomorrow morning, but that's probably not going to happen. You could wish to win a $50 million lottery, and even though you have an outside chance of that wish coming true, it's also probably not going to happen.
Other wishes are quite possible. Wishing you were a kinder person is a reasonable wish. Wishing you might find a better job is also a reasonable wish. Wishing you might travel, say to France, Australia or maybe even Canada, is simply a first step to doing just that.
These realistic kinds of wishes, however, will never come true, unless you do something to make them happen. Want to be a kinder person? So be kinder already. Want a better job? Go out and find one. Want to travel? Save up your pesos and book that flight. Wishes are not always just dreamy nonsense.
And yet, we still hold on to dreamy nonsense.
And to be honest, I think that holding on to dreamy nonsense is important.
It seems to me that, without something unreachable, we are stuck in a quagmire of practicality and routine. We need flights of fantasy every so often. Dreamy stuff is the stuff of happy thoughts. Wishing for what seems impossible allows us to pretend, and pretending allows us to be someone we're not, if only for a moment or two.
Children know it better than adults. Children wish for the wild things, and if those wishes don't come true they wish for wilder things. "I wish I were a princess in a magical kingdom" becomes "I wish I could fly away into the stars and live on the moon."
Stars. It's all about the stars, so far away and yet seemingly almost with one's reach. And that is why we wish on a star.
Good grief, you're not going to wish on the green garbage bin.
