"Is A Dream Alive If It Dont Come True?"
Photo Credit: Tim Yates
“Is a dream alive if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bruce’s words from The River. There’s a gravity in them - a sense of frustration, but more than that, a sense of finality and hopelessness.
Now, I know the specifics of that song and the context within which he sang those words, but as with all things Bruce, his words apply to so much of how we live our lives and the paths we choose to take and the people we choose to love.
Because there are some dreams, that when they don’t come true, don’t just become a memory - an old, quaint notion that we once had as wide-eyed young things, to be parked into the bin of our own personal histories and reminisced over with friends and family many, many years later.
No, they become our own personal, silent companions, weighted chains that lurk in the recesses of our minds, reminding us that they once existed every time we hear a particular song, go to a particular place or simply find ourselves in a very particular, very specific moment of solitude.
We all have them and we all have to deal with them, matter what we’ve done or achieved, personally or professionally. And as we get older, as those who touched us in relation to those dreams - guiding us, helping us, rejecting us or hurting us - move on and leave us, and as we begin to gain a greater sense of perspective on our lives, the question of how we feel about it becomes ever more important.
Of course, I’d like to think that there’s a positive follow-on to those words, that there are lessons we can learn from it that move us forward.
Maybe there is. Maybe, we need to just focus on the positives of what we have and haven’t done and move on. But part of even that involves accepting what we haven’t done and what we haven’t been able to fulfill. This is life I suppose and that’s the problem. It isn’t that easy - we need to accept some things whether we like it or not.
Bruce once said that we’re all broken in some way, whether emotionally or spiritually or some other way. No one can escape that particular horse. So the idea that we can get to some utopia of perpetually and completely fulfilled dreams is naive and we shouldn’t expect that. Perhaps it’s better to realize and accept that’s not what it’s about.
Perhaps when that “dream don’t come true”, rather than let it become something worse, it’s better to learn to accept it and find a way to live with it.
I don’t know if that means that no single dream should define or make us - I don’t know how I feel about that particular implication. Because part of me is very uncomfortable with that idea, because I’ve so often, so strongly defined myself around singular ideas.
But maybe that’s what’s necessary. That our lives should be defined by much more than just one thing, cause we are so much more than just that one thing, no matter what it is. I know we say that - I know I say that a lot - but to really practice it is the real challenge.
Maybe that is what we should learn. That we’re more than any one thing and if we don’t see that, then we need to. That becomes the struggle. For the sake of ourselves and our loved ones. For our own sanity.
