Dreams and Gatsby

Children start out with great dreams. They want to be astronauts, the president or play a professional sport. But the world and people close to them gradually have the dreams reasoned out of them.

I wanted to be a writer most of my young life, but so many people told me I needed to have a back-up plan that eventually the notion of writing for a living gave way to more practical occupational interests.

I used to think dreams were born in children and never followed them to adulthood. But I’ve had dreams as an adult and they carried with them the same wide-eyed hope as they did when I was young. They also died the same ignominious death.

Lately I’ve watched dreams and hopes dashed and it brings me back to those moments when I thought anything was possible and every moment extraordinary while mesmerized by the power of optimism and anticipation. The fall from that lofty moment is a long way the first time. As the years go by, the drop seems less and less precarious, but it hurts just the same. Each time it happens you feel a bit more jaded and a bit more disillusioned. You feel you can’t win, like life keeps dealing you a full house but you know the world’s sitting on a flush.

So I was thinking about dreams today and wondering how to recapture the youthful exuberance of believing in the possible when so many others are telling you to quit. I was thinking we need to have a new dream every time an old dream gets dashed or we’ll just stop our minds from moving forward. It reminded me of my favorite book about one of the all-time greatest dreamers: The Great Gatsby. Gatsby had a new dream born as quickly as his last dream left him. The fantastic final lines of the book sum up how I feel better than any way I can express. It goes something like this:

“And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark field of the public rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning -----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaseless into the past.”