Wishing and dreaming can be some potent stuff. If you look back on your life and see how many things you wished for showed up, you just might be surprised. Sometimes we miss a fulfilled wish because it didn’t manifest in the exact way we envisioned.
Take this gig (Life Happens) for example; I never dreamed or imagined having a monthly platform to share my thought du mois, but I did regularly toy with the idea that it would be fun to share my deepest (and oft times meaningless) thoughts with a larger audience than Hubs. The chances are good that he did too, possibly for a whole set of different reasons which we will not go into here.
Wish fulfilled in my case, whether for my husband’s sake or my own – but what about the cost? Everything, we all know, has a cost. The cost for your wish coming true may not be apparent at first and certainly, doesn’t always show up in dollars and cents. Nonetheless, it comes with a vibrating –for emphasis, not palsy- hand out. Hence, the caution we often hear “careful what you wish for – you might get it.” When the time comes to pay for it, you might have wished you’d been a little more circumspect.
The cost of a wish fulfilled in my example is that it has become incumbent on me to have a thought worth sharing, every single month! No biggie, right? Sometimes coming up with an idea to write about is like making orange juice from an already juiced orange. But that is only one part of being on the fulfilled side of wishes and dreams.
Getting bogged down by day-to-day life is part of the design, even when the day-to-day is a dream come true. Think how well evolution would have worked if our Neanderthal forbearers had been happily content just to plop themselves down in their undecorated caves with a just a stick and a club and no other plans, hope or desire. Driven by an evolutionary to-do loop; we humans Seek, Find, and Repeat. If a genie granted you just one wish – what would you wish for? Another wish. We can never be satisfied with what’s in front of us.
Boredom is built into the human psyche right along with fear and world-weariness. How do I know this, you just might ask. That’s simple. The French and Germans have specific words for it, so it must be so. There is “angst” from the German for fear, which occurs when your wished-for, let’s say, JOB appears. Will you keep it? Is there a better one? It’s a long commute. Your co-workers are just meh. If you even notice this angst working on you, dismiss these things as the cost of a wish fulfilled. You aren’t exactly worrying about it, but thoughts of dissatisfaction have a way of worming their way into your initial joy. As the worm trails start to overlap, you find yourself wishing for a new job.
Then there’s the French word “ennui” for boredom. Boredom can suck the life and soul out a dream that comes true. Cinderella would have been an entirely different story if her fairy godmother hadn’t the foresight to impose a very strict deadline on her big night at the palace. With too many dances with the Prince and all the tedious bowing, the ‘wished-for’ becomes empty and vacant, inciting yet another longing for even the so-called ‘happily ever after’ to be different.
The Germans have another word that encapsulates weariness with the world and all that is in it – Weltschmerz or “world pain”. Not logical, like the philosophy of pessimism, but an emotional response to the idea that there is more bad than good in the world – including your wishes and dreams. If you have given up wishing due to the sadness and you know your dreams will never be all that they could – you are suffering from Weltschmerz.
Every dream that comes true and wish fulfilled is the stuff of miracles and the juice that makes life so good. Remember that dream job? Great at first, right? When tedium sets in, ‘great’ morphs to ‘good’ and sometimes not even close to that. What do you think is the trick to keeping our dreams alive and vibrant? Why do suppose we lose our verve? Like Thomas Wolfe said, “you can’t go home again.” You can never stand in that exact spot where you initially dreamed your dream or wished your wish. That was then-water over the dam. The fulfilled desire is over, and there is a new desire, dream and wish to dream anew.
Don’t be too hard on yourself if you find that your wishes lead to more wishing and dreaming, if wishes were horses, beggars would ultimately be unsatisfied, even with a Ferrari.