Murder your dreams

Artwork: "Ancient One"  Artist: Pedro Krüger Garcia

“Murder your dreams,” he said.

I wasn’t listening.

I was drunk. (Seven straight hours of watching TV is drunk: it doesn’t make you smarter, give you more energy or equip you to do any of the many things it entices you to spend your priceless time watching. It just makes you slightly unresponsive to your immediate surrounding and somewhat more impulsive when you finally take a break from all that pseudo-adrenaline in the kitchen.)

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the exceeding value of the phrase: there are so many stories sweeping about and vying for our attention, the overwhelming majority of which amount to flights of fantasy, the great task of virtue now consists of distinguishing that which is real possibility from that which is a dream you were sold. The discipline of wisdom in any moment is to tell the difference between what is realistic and what is vain hope. Are all those lists you make in your head real things you are actually going to do, or just dreams designed by the devil to make you feel guilty and discontent for not living them?

What are you really going to do? Not, “what do you want?” Not, “what can you imagine?” Not, “what do you evision?” But “what will you do?”

Write that thing down, keep it in the headlights, and put everything else in a shoe box.

The future is just the past with more today still in it.

Till angel cry and trumpet sound,
The Mad Christian