Dave Chappelle reminded me that it's safe to be a dreamer

In fear of ruining the punchline of Dave Chappelle’s most recent show-closing parable punchline, I simply have to share this with you.

Ever since I was very young, I’ve always been a dreamer. I felt bigger than my life. I felt potential coursing through my veins like a gift that, to avoid being perceived as ungrateful, I simply had to not only reach but surpass.

It takes a lot of energy to be a dreamer. We hear stories of the effort it took for exceptional people to achieve their chosen successes. The grit and hustle and white-knuckle determination is delivered to us in vivid detail, over and over again by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and online business coaches. We channel so much of our energy towards actualising the puzzle pieces of our dream that we forget to tend to the dream itself.

All dreams fade, eventually. If we’re lucky it’s because we fulfil them and absorb into them like a plane in the clouds. Some dreams become disconnected from us because we change or the world changes or we uncover something much more appealing. I’m too lazy to look up if there’s any research to support this, but I worry that most dreams fade because we let them.

We get distracted.

Too busy, too serious.

This year I felt my dream fading. It wasn’t as if they were rushing ahead of me while I panted to keep up. Instead it felt like I was watching them shrink in the rear-view mirror, my own hands on the wheel and foot on the pedal.

I self-diagnosed the whole ordeal as an issue with motivation. Grit and hustle and white-knuckled determination would fix this. Except, no matter how many to-do lists I crafted, I couldn’t quite bring myself to really care. I’ll save you from long-winded descriptions of the listless soul-searching that led me to a 10-day silent retreat, Bali, and bed, and I’ll tell you what took me almost an entire year to figure out: I wasn’t even looking at my own dream in that rear-view mirror.

In fear of stretching this metaphor too thin, you know how sometimes you’re driving and you look up and the reflections all crooked? You don’t know when it happened but at some point you must have nudged it off-centre. It’s not even noticeable until you hear a truck coming up behind you. And so it took me some 10 months to notice that the mirror was off-centre and then a mere moment to simply tap it back in place.

I’d begun to understand my dream as a series of checkpoints that I didn’t even choose. It made sense that we’d get trophies along the route. The world tells us what these trophies look like and how much they cost and how aggressively other people want them too. And that’s how I forgot the dream for the trophies.

Whenever I feel off-course I get really hungry for art. I think it might be a survival instinct. Our lizard brain knows we urgently need input so beautiful it jolts us awake. I went from barely picking up a book to cracking a fresh spine every couple days. Wikipedia worm-holes reminded me that there are actually all these weird and elaborate ways to be a human living a life. I was telling myself how foolish and lazy I was to not take advantage of this absolutely bat-shit crazy opportunity I have of being alive.

Research for creatives is our way of gathering enough inspiration until we get to the point where we’re so turned on we have to do something about it. You’ve heard the saying that people don’t change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing. Sometimes that pain is an idea so enticing it burns a hole right through your frozen state. I imagined colours I wanted to see together so badly I simply had to paint them. I started writing down all the things I wish I could teach my nieces. It became harshly clear that I simply had to be brave enough to try as hard as I could to fulfil a dream I have no guarantee of ever completing.

Maintaining a dream is about feeding the dream. We do this not by repeatedly pointing at the problem but in seeking the solutions. These are the experiments we take. There are endless options and so it’s our jobs to uncover the ones that feel most pressing to us. Hence the somewhat manic inspiration-mining followed by a focus and drive I haven’t felt maybe ever.

The dream isn’t in my rear-view anymore. It’s straight ahead. I’m not in a rush though, I’ll get there when I get there. I know the route. There’s just a few stops I’m deciding to take along the way. (Yep, heard you. Well and truly over-played the metaphor).

I’m telling you I’m focused on the journey now and that the sheer experience of having the dream is the prize and that satisfaction comes from clear intention and every other cliche you don’t want to read in yet another post on the internet telling you how you can stop feeling like an absolute failure.

And so, it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m watching an accomplished artist, ever in his prime, glow with enthusiasm around his own dream. My favourite inspiration is never in the art but in the artist. When you witness someone creating and you see satisfaction bubbling in their eyes. That’s the feeling I crave most. Not the stuff or even the ideas-made-real. It’s the feeling of doing it.

Last night as I witnessed Dave Chappelle live his dream, I knew for sure that I have to do everything in my power to live mine.