Where did you learn to dream so small?

Our imaginations run wild through fields of wheat and cotton candy clouds. Keep the dreams. Realism, the people around you, your immediate needs teach you to think small. Sometimes it’s a hustle, a perpetual treadmill, or you’re living someone else’s dream. You left your dreams on the night stand.

Sunken by callous stones. Fear holds you back, when you’ve gone much further before. Anchors to moor you. Small minded people, want to keep you in a box, hold you down. But, you know that Mt. Olympus calls your name. Your name written in the stars with Rama and Hercules. To go places, do things, create and envision something better. These are the dreams that many fear to dream.

We’re told what to think, how to act, what is appropriate, what is proper, what is acceptable. They’ll keep you line. A paragon of morality, to cut out your tongue and police your thoughts. Wrapped in security, paranoia, and fed platitudes to live up to. Where are your own thoughts? You’ve been conditioned to live in a snow globe.

Like the flakes of snow that swirls around, White supremacy and Eurocentrism tells who you need to be. And what they deem acceptable. Their rules, their way of life, their belief systems, their ideologies. And we’re just pawns their in game. In a world that conspires to rule you, look through the veil Neo. Find enlightenment young Buddha. Feel the force Padawan.

These tangled messes are woven to say who you are, what you have to be, and what you can do. It’s all a lie. There is no inherent right or wrong. You come into the world, and it is up to you: how you want to live, who you are, and what you want to do with that precious life. The most precious currency in the world. A mint of a kind.

Follow your heart. What does it beat for? It calls your name. It always has. Follow that voice in the cacophony of phoniness. Don’t live a life of tip-toe trip wires and unsettled land mines. A knowledge of self and inner strength will allow you to determine your own path. A berlin wall, screeds, and creeds pave a path already taken. Blinders on a horse, binders on your feet, shackles on your wrists. Here’s one more worn metaphor; go against the grain.

The issue is when the radical goes mainstream, and is watered down in the curves and rapids. Ideas and -ology brought to the masses to repeat in robocall recordings. It might not bother you, but it does me. A mirage of what it meant and what it used to be. A strawman resides where I used to be.

In a world where billions are connected, and everyone you know is the media, everything is brought up a notch. Icons are made and broken over night. A race to collect followers, attention, likes, and reacts. I admit it. I want them too. An easy trap to fall into. Don’t go against the grain because doing so will bring you attention, or because you think that people will like it. Choose your own grain, be it rice or quinoa, because your values lead you. Your dreams call you. Justice compels to you. Adventure beckons. Boredom breaks you. Ordinary annoys you.

Be your best self. Don’t do it for anyone else in the world. Do it for you. Do it for you. Dream the wildest dreams that were once thought unthinkable. Don’t be in the box or out of the box. If you want, just be the best damn boxer the world has ever seen.

“Sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”~ Alice