This postTo dream or not to dream: that is the question. Last night my roommate told me that there was a survey a few years ago on satisfaction, and they found that the Danish were the most satisfied, because they had the lowest expectations. Logically, it makes sense. If you don’t expect much, you’ve got a much higher chance at meeting and even surpassing your expectations.
And yet this philosophy bothers me.
There are risks in just about every area of life — love, the arts, business, and school, to name just a few. Will the person you’re interested in return your affections? Will people like your new painting or novel? Will your startup succeed? Will you be able to get into the grad school of your dreams?
With any type of risk, I see two main paths of action. The first, which I’ll call the Pragmatist, falls in with the Danish. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Better safe than sorry. Come down to earth, get your head out of the clouds. The chances for failure are high, you see, and you don’t want to get crushed when you don’t succeed.
It’s a persuasive idea, really — I for one don’t like getting hurt, and wrapping myself up in a security blanket is what I do instinctively. Self-preservation. No sense sticking your head out when it’s likely to get chopped off. Stay safe, come what may. Whatever will happen, will happen. Yadda yadda yadda.
The Pragmatist is wrong. Perhaps not completely, since to everything there is a time and a season, but overall I’m not impressed with what the Pragmatist has to offer. Instead, I turn to the Dreamer philosophy: “The greater danger is not that our aim is too high and we miss it,” said Michelangelo, “but that it is too low and we reach it.”
The Dreamer acknowledges that there’s a possibility of failure, but doesn’t let that paralyze him or her out of action. Staying in our comfort zones probably ensures our safety (but even then that’s not guaranteed), but it also ensures that our chances for growth are minimalized. To progress, we have to take chances. We have to step into the darkness believing that the light will follow. We have to dream the impossible dream.
Can we make progress otherwise? If we can, it pales in comparison to what we can achieve when we open our hearts to dream big. Only when we accept the possibility of spectacular failure do we open the doors to success beyond our wildest dreams. Success and failure are Siamese twins — cut off the one, and the other will fade into obscurity.
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt
Speaking particularly of love, C.S. Lewis had this brilliant nugget of wisdom to say (and it applies to other risks as well):
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
Safety is overrated. It’s important, and we all yearn for it — I know I do — but if we’re going to summit our personal Everests, we have to put safety to the side and trust that there can be miracles when we believe. We might fail miserably. But we also might reach the stars. That kind of potential mutes my fear of heights, stirs me up to action, and breathes into me the courage to take chances. Even if I fail, it’s worth it. Into the brilliant dawn of success or into the dark midnight of failure, but none of this weak, bland, gray twilight, please. Hot or cold, black or white. If I can’t have success, give me a healthy dose of failure that’ll energize me to rise to my knees the next time, and the next, and the next, until I finally reach my goals and bask in the sunrise of victory. It took Edison 2,000 failures to succeed with the light bulb, you know.
(And yes, I know that the Siamese twins image is biologically inaccurate. Oh well. :))
