Human Kindness:  Dream-Paths

By W. Owen Thornton

I’d like to write about human kindness and dream-paths.  To practice human kindness upon yourself when you have a dream means you need to do that which you can to fulfill your dream, naturally.  Dreams come with plans … stages that you can manage meaningfully.  If your dream looks like an elephant, you don’t try to eat it all at once.  It’s too big and you’ll risk frustrating yourself and then giving up on your dream.  Better to break a dream down into bits and pieces.  The old adage is that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time … where each bite represents a planned stage with a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, reality-based and timed (SMART).  So writing a 20-page chapter in a week by spending the first hour of your day writing each and every day is good, while: thinking you can write a full 300-page novel in a month isn’t … unless you’re Stephen King that is (most people don’t write nearly that fast and many prize-winning novels take authors upwards of a decade (so don’t give up your day job, eh?)).  But even then, it’s hard to know how to plan SMART stages for your dream.

For example, when you enter a dream area, you’re not educated or skilled in attaining it.  You could talk to people who’ve achieved your dream for themselves and you can learn how they made it.  You can take non-credit courses from experts at community colleges or through library programs.  Learn what it’s like to “BE” someone who is attaining that kind of dream.  Discover what skills or qualities others suggest you require in order to reach your dream.  If you want stability and a family in your life, then the solitary life of a roving, starving actor may simply be outside of your character.  The Brad Pitts and the Angelina Jolie’s of this world are exceedingly rare.  Find a way to be realistic with your dreams.  Maybe you can get a job during the day that you can tolerate and that can put food on the table while you work with a volunteer theatre company in your area.  No company like that around where you are?  Maybe you should start one!  But if you learn that you may not like the sacrifices required of you in order to make it, your dream is nothing more than a passing fancy.  Sacrifices for dreams should be the kind of thing you don’t even notice.  So you take ten years before you write your best seller and an interviewer asks you if you disliked the years you spent alone in your writer’s garret and you look at them and say, “Huh!  I never even noticed.  I’m kind of a loner anyways.  There’s nothing I love more than writing down the things about the world that I observe but feel powerless to change.  But in my writing, my characters can do anything.”

Dreams come at the expense of about 10,000 hours of time before you become an expert in … anything.  Before the Beatles came to North America to take the world by storm, they had gigs in German bars where they played music, performing before a crowd, eight hours a day … in many cases seven days a week.  Eight times seven days equals 56 hours/week.  Therefore in order to gain the 10,000 hours of expertise that most people agree is required of someone before they’ll become an expert at any task, would take 179 weeks or 3.5 years of work doing at a 56 hour/week pace.  If you love what you’re doing, you can sock away the hours much faster than that.  It is thought that Bill Gates and a few other fellows in his computer classes would go to school all day and work all night at programming things.  Stories abound of Gates working 100 hours/week or more while at university.  There he honed his craft rather quickly.  But I’m sure that work came at the sacrifice of sleep, friendship (other than the ones he was working with), parties and many other deprivations.  I can only suspect that while pursuing a dream at that rate, one would run smack-dab into a bout of awareness that would make them say, “Why in the world am I working this hard at this?  I could have gone to that party last night!”  And then, he would probably get swept away by the excitement of the next computer problem and the awareness that he was going to miss the next party as well would be gone in the joy he found in the work.

But you can do everything right and still not make it.  Being an Angelina or a Stephen King can take luck, being in the right place at the right time and sometimes, life doesn’t offer you those breaks.  So dreams come with bumps in the road.  It’s difficult to know if those bumps are signs that the dream is off-base or whether it’s all a part of the process to attaining the dream.  Norman Vincent Peale was fond of saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”  In other words you have to be flexible, creative and inventive when you’re in a dream path.  And … you need people to help support you.  When Norman’s best seller, The Power of Positive Thinking was rejected for the 100^th time, it was his wife, Ruth, who pulled it out of the garbage, dusted it off and took it to the 101^st publisher who printed it and helped Norman to sell millions of copies of his book. 

I’ve never been one who can read signs well.  I think I’m rather like Jim Carey in Bruce Almighty.  In that movie Jim is praying to God for a sign.  A sign truck, literally pulls in front of Jim, and drives slowly.  Out the back of the truck you read, “wrong way”, “stop”, and “yield” but Jim’s character misses them all and continues on driving until he has a minor traffic accident.  I simultaneously had two dreams: one to run a freelance writing business that would earn decent enough money to support my fiction writing habit (until my wildly-selling novels give me a career all its own).  Neither dream ever got off the ground over nearly 20 years.  I just didn’t know if I was doing something wrong, or if I was doing something write and just had to wait a little longer for the success I desired.  I knew I had problems.  I knew I couldn’t sell myself well enough, and I know that the writing market is an exceedingly tough game (the average freelancers in Canada earns about $11,000 – but that’s for full-time work and it leaves no time for the fiction) but I think there were many other factors that led to both of these dreams finally failing.  I languished for 10 years in a life position that led me into a depressing rut.  There is one thing that I know about dreams now that I didn’t know then.

When I found taking philosophy courses, I fell in love with something all over again.  I’d long had my love of my work and my fiction-writing dream beaten out of me.  I felt trapped and foolish for being intelligent and not knowing how to get out.  And then God put all sorts of signs in front of me.  It began with writing for this web-blog and hoping that I could write something for it that was both intelligent and insightful.  I went to the mature student advisor at the University of Western Ontario seeking classes that could allow me to write better for thehumankindnessproject and it was she who directed me to my first philosophy class.  What an interesting thing.  I’ve since attended two other universities in philosophy and to my knowledge, neither school has such a position: so had I lived near those other schools there may have been no one to call, no one to direct me into philosophy … so I was in the right place at the right time with the right person.

So here’s what I know about dreams-paths.  You’ll do anything you can to make them work because you love it so much, you don’t even notice you’re sacrificing other things people think are important to them.  You will run out of energy long before it is over and you will need people and the reading of signs to give you the perspective you require in order to continue or … to give up.  My dream-path is in its fifth year and I’m tired and for the first time, I don’t want to go back to school and face all that work … but it’s only 13 weeks until the hardest part is over and I get to write about something I’m incredibly passionate about: thirteen weeks of learning and feeling frustrated and of maybe not necessarily taking courses in subjects that I love, but in subjects that complete my degree requirements.  So I have one last stage to overcome before the dream morphs more directly into the kind of thing I want to do: write and teach philosophy.

In the process of getting here, some interesting things happened.  I fully intended on doing some writing/newsletter business while going to school.  Within the first year, all my clients were gone through no fault of my own: my newsletter clients were either exhausted of doing newsletters or were moving to an electronic format or both scenarios played out simultaneously.  It seemed I was destined to go back to school full time.  I did so.  By my master’s year, year five, I was being paid to be a TA and income started coming back into the family coffers.  And this year I received a provincial scholarship to enhance what my school was going to give me and so the positive signs keep coming (including getting into Laurier for my Masters and into McMaster for my Ph.D. program).  People want me in their programs … see me as the kind of person who will represent them well in the present and the future and people have also written letters of reference about my character that have helped me get into these new schools.

When I wanted to quit school, I found “adamant” support.  When I told a friend and explained my challenges, she listened and said, “I think you’re where you need to be.”  Strange that she would sense that and I would not … but sometimes you are not the one to see the signs pointing you to your dream-path.  And I know that were I to quit now, I would regret it.  It’s just that this last bite is a bit harder to chew … and … I’m not getting any younger in regards to the kind of energy I can bring to the table (as opposed to when I was 20).  But I still bring an excitement and a joy to the process of writing a good paper and I’ll hold on to that.  Even in the midst of my struggles, I’ve found cool things from the subject matter … lessons and ideas that I never would have received otherwise.

Now when I quit my business I did not regret it, so that’s a sign of successfully ending an ineffective dream-path.  I did miss working with my clients, sure, but I didn’t miss the terrible feeling of continual failure of never getting that full-time salary to match the full-time work.  I felt that way for nearly ten years.  So when I finally let go of that old dream, I was so glad to do so.  And when I find the time between courses and essays, I still dabble in fiction.  But I think that goal has morphed too.  I’ll write just for me from now on … leaving behind the bedazzled hope for fiction-stardom.  And maybe, in letting go of that dream … well, who knows … maybe a different mental approach will mean making headway in that dream-path as well.

But who knows.  We pick our dreams and we strive forwards and sometimes they work and sometimes they fail.  We do receive lemons in this life.  What’s important about that fact is not that we receive them, but it how we react to those lemons.  We can let them destroy us, or we can be innovative and find a way to utilize them.  And maybe that’s the life lesson any dream-path means to teach us.

God Bless and have a great 2012.

Owen