Dream on

Instead of limiting our imagination behind our circumstances, we need to be comfortable with wandering off the script.

“I was secretly hoping that my flight back to Karachi would crash somehow,” admitted a close friend recently. He stood nervously on the edge of yet another year passing by without being able to pursue his dreams — and what he believes is his true potential — because of ‘external circumstances’ that hold him hostage. All of us probably had end-of-the-year ‘what am I doing with my life’ conversations with ourselves but for my friend, these conversations were quickly snowballing into a full-blown midlife crisis, brought into dramatic focus with turbulence on an aircraft that appeared to be timed poetically with end-of-the-year turbulence in his life.

His revelation forces us to question conventional wisdom we often take for granted: do our dreams actually hurt us more than they help? Unfortunately, my friend’s case is not that uncommon in Pakistani society. Here’s someone who wants to become an entrepreneur and a thought leader for entrepreneurs in Pakistan. But instead of pursuing his dreams, he’s fully committed to a nine-to-five job to support his aging parents, who need the consistent income that his job brings. He feels paralysed as having to choose between his dreams and being an ungrateful son is like having to choose between saving your spouse or your children on a sinking ship. In the dizzying pace of everyday life in Pakistan, we often forget that the biggest life choices we make are the ones we involuntarily stumble upon because of our inability to choose between the actual choices in front of us. At the end of every year though, time inevitably slows down and lets us take stock of the year that has passed.

And what a difference a year makes! One year is all it takes to turn our lives and our dreams upside down. Or, at least, bring our inability to realise our dreams to surface in unexpected ways. No pun intended but if we could collect a dollar every time someone expresses frustration at their inability to pursue their dreams or what they really want to do with their lives because of the immediate needs of their family or social pressures, we would actually have enough money to fund all our collective dreams. If reality is actually as bad as it appears to be, isn’t it more rational to find ways to be happier with the choices we’re actually making in the real world rather than feeling remorseful about not being able to pursue some hypothetical dream life we feel we can’t actually pursue given our circumstances?

What appears to be collective irrationality by a significant number of Pakistanis may actually be very rational behaviour if we change the prism through which we view our dreams and aspirations. What if our instincts are trying to tell us something our minds are no longer willing to hear because of social conditioning in Pakistan? The ‘external circumstances’ that we blame for holding back our dreams are actually the script of a successful life in Pakistan: graduating from a top tier university, getting a decent job, buying a car, sending your parents for Hajj, getting your sister married, getting married yourself, having children, beaming with pride at their graduation, getting them married and then dying — with a well- attended funeral.

Perhaps, the greatest gift God blessed mankind with is the ability to imagine and create a future — any future we would like to have — if we make the right choices. This is why mankind has been able to send man to the moon and individuals have been able to single-handedly bend the arc of human history by the sheer force of their will. It’s not as if these individuals don’t have families or exist in a vacuum from the social pressures we feel are holding us back. When individuals genuinely believe that their dreams are their destiny, they don’t suddenly have doors open automatically for them. Instead, the adversity of their circumstances forces them to grow into individuals that accomplish the extraordinary.

The irony of all this is that my friend is perfectly capable of realising his dream life. But there’s a reason why some countries have been able to send man to the moon, while Pakistani society can’t even agree on when a moon is sighted to celebrate Eid. Instead of imprisoning our imagination behind our circumstances, we need to be more comfortable with wandering off the script and once in a while, letting life take us where we really want to go. We’ll be surprised by how much we’re truly capable of giving to the world.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 2^nd, 2014.

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