Ohh summer! Here you are with your wavy heat and high crime rates. Here you are making a two block walk a sweaty experience. Here you are burning bright above signaling vacation time. Ohh summer…you are fucking awful, but you are gone now. Tucking your heat and sweat beads away until next year. Leaving t-shirts matted to the bottom of drawers. We can now start dusting off the courdorouys and hooded zip-up sweatshirts. Iced coffee melts into hot coffee and we can all sit around and small talk each other to death for a month: “I can’t believe the summer is over!? It went so fast where did it go? It didn’t even feel like summer! I miss the summer!” You will most likely be saying or hearing these words for the next 2 months. The end of this summer was different. Someone said something to me that struck me like the summer sun, and it had nothing to do with the seasons.
‘People don’t have dreams anymore. I can’t imagine someone feeling like they were too old to have dreams. How could you not have dreams anymore,” said Theodor.
He wasn’t talking about dreaming while our eyes are shut. He wasn’t talking about getting on the school bus naked type dream or the dream where you have to run away but are moving at the speed of molasses. Those dreams, like the 4 seasons, will happen throughout our existence.
He was talking about your dream. Maybe you do something as simple as hitting the game winning shot in Game 7. Maybe you fall in love and marry that beautiful person you saw in a fleeting glance on the train one day. You might win an Oscar, possibly a Pulitzer. You might save a child right before they are struck by a car, sacrificing your body for theirs. You could be a war hero, fighter pilot, famous actor, musician, CEO, circus performer, painter, puppeteer, doctor or even just a loving parent. You all had some dreams at some point.
We may have moved on from those daydreaming days in grade school, and we now sit in offices waiting for happy hour or to head home to our loved ones. Summer isn’t as important as it used to be because there are no more summer breaks. We aren’t scooping ice cream or carrying golf bags for some extra change in our pockets. We deal with mortgages and health insurance. Relationships fade and become more painful when finally broken. We are all a little bit jaded and our skin is thicker and a bit prickly these days. Some moments in life might be rougher than others, more than we all thought we could handle, but they too will come and go like the 4 seasons.
That dream you hold, no matter how silly, will always be around. It should never falter or fade. It should never be left in your old shoebox full of G.I. Joe’s or your Barbie Malibu dream house. It should stay as silly as it was then. You might suck at basketball, but you still hit the game winner. You have zero dexterity but you are fixing a newborn’s heart. You are scared to jump in front of that car to save the kid, but you will do it. You will push that child out of the way, send them fleeing to the sidewalk with just a few scratches. You take the hit in front of a crowd of onlookers who gasp in horror and are filled with honor at the same time. They have just witnessed an envious selfless act of bravery. You will roll around for a bit in shock, but you will get up. You will dust off and refuse to talk to the media.
That’s what fucking dreams are. You know how it happens, nobody else. Not some bullshit recurring dream about the summer, fall, winter or spring. You need your dreams, no matter how unattainable. Don’t let go of that dream that starred while you were awake one day in the 4th grade.
Jump in front of that car because in your mind you do it flawlessly.
'Oh, don't carve me out! Don't let your silly dreams,
fall in between the crack of the bed and the wall.' -Jim James
Random Ben Has Moved
13 years ago
