The land of invincible innocence
Children know how to dream; lambs know how to bounce. Sheep
and adults hang around fields and coffee-bars, talking about the science of
bouncy dreaming.
But adults never lose the knowledge – they just bury it
under systems and formulas and a bizarre compulsion to prove it to someone
else. A child doesn’t require you to share its dream-zone – will even continue
with it, in the teeth of ridicule – and a lamb is unconcerned with the
remarkable physics of its four footed, four-feet feat of forfeiting gravity.
Children don’t actually need empowering. They just need the
adults about them to stop disempowering them. A child bought up in safe freedom
and surrounded by a creative love will fly to Mars and be back for tea. Every
child dreams and knows the power of the feeling; it is bringing the precious
truth of that knowledge into the world that others call real, that can provide
a challenge.
And we are still children too. We make-believe our
seriousness and we put on a theatrical display of importance, but it is a very
thin disguise. It only takes a moment of gasping wonder at the edge of a
waterfall, a sudden pang as a barn owl weaves the shadows into a shawl of
remembrance, the smell of apple and cinnamon with geraniums on the window
sill….and we are back there again.
Whenever we stop pumping up our seriously important, outside
make-believe, the precious truth of the inside bobs up from the depths to say
hullo. That is why adults are so exhausted (and sheep gaze across endless green
fields despondently) because it is debilitating work continuously dodging the
flickering memories of our unique dream.
There is something inside us that fires us, something that
we do effortlessly and beautifully, something that helps the people watching us
to feel the universal magic oozing out. If only we would stop asking other
people for their opinion. We know the answer and we have the truth inside us,
in the sweet-spot of invincible innocence.
Way before we learnt the wearisome codes of intrigue and
subtlety and nuance that society demands of its dancers, we had clean, clear,
verifiable contact with who we most naturally are. That contact is our
power-zone. Often people want you to stop believing in the majesty of your
dream, because your success exposes them to the compromises they have made to
the tyranny of impotence. Every success is a challenge to those who hide from
their success. It brings us to the point of choice between ‘getting by’, ‘being
comfortable’, and ‘living exceptionally’.
The game is to be a bridge between the unlimited impulses of
the spirit and the necessarily constrained expressions of the physical world.
Dysfunctional Peter Pans are not the answer. We learn to play within the rules
of the agreed external reality and find a way to brandish our unique, miraculous
perspective.
A dreamer once said, ‘I want to fly like the birds.’
A dreamer once said, ‘I want to walk on the moon.’
A dreamer once said, ‘I want to talk with my aunt on the
other side of the world.’
A dreamer once said, ‘I want to see my aunt while I talk
to her on the other side of the
world’
And most of the people about
them said,
‘Dreamer, dreamer, running
away without a leg
Dreamer, dreamer, trying to hatch a cuckoo egg’.
But they weren’t, and they didn’t listen. Instead, they
started building the bridge between the visionary truth inside them and the
limited truth outside. Any inspirational dream will always stretch the fabric
of your reality; it will push you outside your comfort zone, and demand you to
taste the exhilaration of your divinity. You will not have a passionate vision
without the ability to realise it, though you will undoubtedly have to reach up
and reach out.
Children and caterpillars know how to dream. Telling the
caterpillar that nothing that fat, green and shiny has ever flown before is
disempowering. It is much more fruitful to chat about what shape of wing and
what colour of pattern inspires it, and to reassure it that (despite powerful
evidence to the contrary) the wings will enable it to fly high above the trees
and search for nectar in valleys unknown.
Rather than tell people to ‘stop dreaming’ and to ‘wake up
and get real’, it is much more useful to enable them to feel their way through
lots of smaller fancies, to the one big dream that ‘burns inside them with an
incontrovertible incandescence’.
It is never too late for
chrysalisation, or bouncing.
