The Hand of the Pessimist

There was once a time in which dreams of greatness existed within the vacuum of a minuscule world, one that was full of wondrous familiarity, and little variables. As we wrote our dreams on the paper, the prospect of those dreams were the source from which we derived our passion and imagination. As years passed, we were told that our dreams are just that, we were told to construct a backup plan to our inevitable failure, which even then seemed evitable. As our voices became morbid to listen to, so did the words spoken to us by those who had embraced the harsh reality in which we existed. As our dreams shifted from astronauts to accountants, we spoke of lesser things and lesser ideas. A dream deviation was only standard and the line between a doctor and an engineer was no longer calculated by impact but rather by salary, instead of changing the world we let the world change us, and instead of conquering our biggest dreams, we let our biggest dreams conquer us, leaving us soulless in front of a faceless world in which we accepted as the only way out. At an early age we put our dreams in a bottle and sent it out to sea, only to be discovered and crushed once again, instead of looking up at space in wonder, we looked at our own face in wonder of where we went wrong, but as went is in the past tense, so was our passion, we gathered ourselves and walked back to the television set that was once used as a break from activity, but since activity had already broken us, we sat there mindless and gazing at the perpetual ignorance from which we derive our meaninglessness and inertia. The great Albert Einstein once said "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." If we are told our whole lives that we cannot achieve our dreams, we will live our whole lives in the belief that dreams are just dreams, and as the hand of the pessimist strikes we will fall down and refuse to get back up, where our once bright and buoyant dreams existed, we now only feel despondent. We feel weak and helpless against the inevitability of failure and nullity, and while the other fish evolve to have legs, we still sit at the bottom of a tree that never seems to end, and there we could stay... or we could turn and swim. When that very hand that struck you down hits again, we can get up, brush ourselves off, and continue moving towards the dream that is no longer tarnished by the words of others, and the closer we get to it, the more tangible it will become, and as we are struck harder and harder the closer we get to it, our vehemence will put one foot in front of the other until the tips of our fingers are so close to touching it, we can feel the weight lifted off our chest, that same weight that kept you at the bottom of the tree... But if we don't get there, our minds will swirl with what if statements, and we will fail to be defined by what we did do but instead what we could have done. The hand will no longer strike, but optimism will no longer carry you forward, and there we will be stuck, in the vast nullity of an unfamiliar vacuum, and worst of all, we might just grow legs, we might be that very hand that strikes the dreamer down, the dreamer that manifests all of our failures, that ignorant dreamer that has yet to accept reality, that ignorant dreamer that has a skewed naive perception of the real world, that evil dreamer that wants to alter everything we have in place, that evil dreamer that refuses to fail like most of us have done... That dreamer that envisions a new way, that dreamer that does the opposite of everything they have been told, that dreamer that has a courageous and powerful mind, that dreamer who wants to change the world, the dreamer we once were, the dreamer We still are, the dreamer We don't want to be. We will deny that we all have a dream, we all want to be something more, and the everlasting pursuit for greatness may be one too terrifying to take on, but one we all have dreamed of. While we might propel the hand, and have legs under us, deep down we all are dreamers, but we are all selfish, if we cannot have it we declare no one else can have it, and if we do work hard enough to achieve that dream, we must teach others how to swim, how to get back up, and how to fight for that same dream that once seemed so unachievable, in the face of a society full of what could have beens, what could still be is something worth fighting for, and in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."