The land of invincible innocence

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.