The Naked Jumper – Pt. 3

“Dream Killers”

The Jumper Nightmare: Having cake and eating it

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When we’re children we allow ourselves to be anything we want; we cannot see any reason why we can’t be what we want. However, a bit later we find out we were just practising and what “we want to be” is supposed to happen when we grow-up. So, we all look forward to being grown-ups. However, along the way to being grown-up we learn that it’s acceptable to not be what we want, in fact, it’s often encouraged and we learn about all the impossibilities of our dreams and aspirations; making them all useless, purposeless and fanciful. Until finally we grow up and embarrassed by our “childish thoughts”, we throw away our dreams.

Instead, we have children, houses, jobs, money, holidays and cars to replace our dreams. Dreams and aspirations are considered a temporary disease of youth and set aside for the young and innocent. It’s taken for granted such “foolishness” and “naivety” will get sucked out of us by life’s little setbacks, disappointments and potholes in the road. The best that most adults can do is dream and aspire for “better” children, houses, jobs, money, holidays and cars and that’s all we can envisage for ourselves; that’s all we can “realistically” dream of.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the biggest obstacle to us having “anything in the world that we might want” are the thoughts in our heads; what is “realistic” limits our tomorrows and makes a dissatisfying bed to lie in today. However, there’s a tendency to think the reverse; if we have dreams it’ll only make us dissatisfied and disappointed with our lot. When we see others achieve spectacular things, things that we don’t even allow ourselves to dream of, we secretly despise them; deep down we mutter to ourselves that those people are no better than we are and they aren’t that special really. Actually, they are. However, it’s  only a simple thing that makes them different; they’ve gone after their dreams. Those supposedly magical people among us, for whatever reason, have held on to that childhood spark; the wonder  and curiousity that allows them the breadth to entertain ideas, imaginings and thoughts that others would immediately dismiss. Their excitement and tenacity drives them forward to find out, to know how that idea, imagining or thought ends up; they take their dreams  with them into adulthood and are brave enough see how their dreams fare in “harsh” reality and often they discover that reality isn’t so harsh after all. 

Underneath it all, whatever “cake” means to each of us, we really do know that “having one’s cake and eating it” actually does make us happy. We don’t allow ourselves to even dream of “having cake”, nevermind about “eating it”.  If we can’t think what we want, we’re definitely not going to get it. We’ve cancelled out all and any opportunity of “cake” in one fell swoop because we don’t allow ourselves to “indulge” in the thought. All other “cake” disappears down the same disposal shoot;  the thoughts and deeds that never were. By the time we reach adulthood, we have no cake to eat and the idea of eating it gives us nightmares. And therein lies the rub.

The trouble is, we treat our thoughts like potential crimes just waiting to happen, and we stop ourselves from thinking. Worst of all we stop ourselves from thinking positively because we have learnt not to trust, listen and act on the good stuff that pops up in our heads. We are superb at rationalising and thinking ourselves out of it; we are incredibly fluent in the language of limitation, curtailment and censorship.  We have an extraordinarily large vocabulary of negativity and defeatism; words like “impossible”, “stupidity”, “failure”, “old”, “wrong”, “ridiculous”, “foolish”, “irresponsible” etc. Sure, we’ll encounter things that sometimes get in the way of “having cake and eating it” but it doesn’t mean we can’t achieve it. Unfortunately, for most, by the time we even have an inkling that anything is amiss in a “cakeless” existence, we have completed our rites of sheeplehood and the Jumpers, overseers of ceremonies, have sold us the sheeple way of life. We’ve learnt to be secretly terrified of what other people may think, so much so, we proactively defend ourselves by embodying those very thoughts and voicing them as our own. Meanwhile, gnawing away inside of us is the pain of regret, whispering “you could have had it all, why didn’t you try?”

At the end of the day, you are the only person who really knows your true worth; nobody else experiences your experience of life, nobody holds the yardstick apart from you, so why use it to beat yourself with? Jumpers (terrified we might be “better than” them) do that for us; they’ll merrily smack you down with their stealth rhetoric of  facial expression and implied guilt, triggering phrases in your head like “who do you think you are…”, “so, you think you’re better than me…”, “and what makes you so special… “, “how dare you… “, “oh, so you think you’re above it all …”, “what’s wrong with you…” etc. Couple that with our  language of negativity and defeatism and we’ve got a dumpster truck full of our cake teleporting itself off to another reality.

So, how do we reclaim our cake? Easy, we just take what’s ours. What we forget is that we have the right to be happy. We are all entitled to have our cake and to eat it; we all have the opportunity to shape the lives we lead and the world we live in…  but first we need to envisage what kind of life and world we want.

It’s cake time!

dmojo
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©Dmojo, 2008-2009.