This month I will be swamped with projects so I will not be able to dedicate as much time to the site as I would like. So we will be revisiting some of the best posts from Dream Anvil’s of the past! This post originally appeared on the Dream Anvil back in April 2015.
What is it you want to do? It is a simple question, one we have all been asked since we were little children. Since grade school we have had to write essays about what we wanted to do with our lives. Yet when I ask adults this same question I am often met with befuddlement. What do you want to do with the life you have been given?
Throughout our educations we are driven towards the occupations that will provide good jobs. The hobbies and things we like to do are often treated as secondary and unimportant. If you think I am wrong just look at the music and art programs that are getting slashed and burned from curriculum’s across the nation. Instead of focusing on letting students purse their passions our education system is stamping out workers. People who can do advanced calculus are important, but so are the people who can paint, draw, sing and write.
I have always been a student of the arts. Thankfully I went to a school that had an abundance of art classes, yet I was never steered into that field. Instead I was told I should pursue something that I could earn a living doing. It is something I see time and time again. People who hang up their brushes and quills to spend all day in a cube farm, waiting for the weekend. Scratching out a living in the pursuit of the American dream. Would we still count down the days until Friday if we actually liked our jobs? Would we still need to consume massive amounts of Starbucks just to get through our day?
The fact is that the things we love to do, the rare moments when we get to exercise our skills and talents, are done more readily and with much more skill than the drudgery of the everyday. We have been told that we need to get that next promotion, we need that next bonus, we need that new house or that new smart phone. So we trade in our dreams for a new one, an American one that isn’t very American at all. America wasn’t built by drones, it was built by vibrant and amazing dreamers. People who envisioned a future, not a paycheck. People who were told something was impossible and went out and did it anyways. Since our founding, Americans have been driven to conquer the unconquerable. When told the world was flat we sailed around the tip of it. When told we could not travel to the other side of the continent we sent wagons, then we built trains. When gravity told us we could only build so high we invented skyscrapers. When we were told that man wasn’t meant to fly, we built airplanes. When they said that a man would never walk on the moon, we brought a car. This is the American dream. To discover new ideas and new things. To explore the edges of what is knowable. To dare to do the impossible.
America was founded by dreamers and by golly it can be full of them again one day. Each and every one of us has a dream inside of us. It doesn’t matter how old you are, it doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are. Each one of us can be a dreamer if we dare. Pick up your brushes and paint again. Write, dance, sing and explore, make your own dreams come true. This world is full of the unknown, full of wonder and amazement. I refuse to live in a dream that is not my own. I will live an American dream of my own crafting.