An Open Letter to Myself circa May 2007

Dreams are simply the way in which we imagine ourselves given the right combination of the fullest potential expression of all our aptitudes and a few strokes of luck, the latter of varying degrees of intensity depending on the size and scope of said dream.

Existentially (and, some confused people will say, spiritually) we are creatures of constant motion, as darting and lethal in a treacle-like medium of self-inflicted emotion and interpersonal attachment as a shark is in water. Always are we striving, not yet being, but always a dynamic and unformed becoming.

The great motivating carrot of realization is held just out of tongue’s reach by the circumstance of unsympathetic reality, a stick of variable (and often varying) length.

The death of a dream, for nearly everyone, is a regular rite of adult passage. Childhood dreams are promises we make to ourselves with an imperfect understanding of the rules of mortality and physics and are thus easily broken, always made with unrealized crossed fingers. They can fade and vanish, sometimes even unfelt and unremarked upon, as the vestigial parts of a creature that no longer exists, killed by the cold instinct for survival and the passage of time, the same forces that motivate evolution everywhere else, ever. Wings like a bird, we realize eventually, are stupid things to wish for without the tradeoff hollow bones and a downward-facing ass to make the muscular effort of flight a) possible and b) worth it.

The dreams of late adolescence and adulthood are something else entirely. Certainly they can come from a similar place of unreason and blind hope as the dreams of children do, but they come without the excuse of uninformed ignorance, on the wrong side of the wall of hormonal and mortal awakening for easy dismissal.

Humans by and large are weak creatures. We bear nails instead of claws, teeth instead of fangs, skin instead of armor, no match for any apex predator in any environment when assayed pound for pound, ability for ability, instinct for instinct. Our delicacy and softness are sacrifices we make in service to our great elephantine brains, engines of ingenuity so vast and limitless we still, hundreds of thousands of years since we realized we had them, do not begin to comprehend in either form or implemented function. The cognitive leap required to conjure attaching a bit of sharpened flint to a stick longer than the arm’s reach of a bear comes with a cost of ponderability; the ability to think of things necessary, it seems, requires the side-effect of being able to think of things less obviously necessary. Abstraction and consequence-prediction grant us invention, but also pollute us with complications of angst and worry and yearning and hope.


Wandering through darkness, driven by the carrot as a memory, a promise, a thought without the visual evidence of its reality; a true abstraction that drives us the same nonetheless. And then, at last, to be blessed with a crack permitting the dimmest of blinding lights only to see that somewhere along the way, in the swallowing, obscurant deep, you now follow only a stick and empty string.

The first response is to stop; to recognize, comprehend and to consider. Not just to consider possible plans of remedial action, but to consider for the sake of consideration. And therein lies the human trap. There is no backward. There is no undoing. Behind you is blindness, the numbness of lightless utter cold, a vast impossibility of relief wrapped in the cruelly unwarming, constricting black velvet blanket of Done.

So we stand, staring, inanimate, fixated on the string unadorned, hobbled like James Caan in “Misery,” taken hostage by the heavyset crazy lady called Why?

Why? we know is not a question of action. Why? is a question of retrospection, drawing the strength from our already meager limbs to fire the resource-starved engine of our mighty, mighty brains. Why? we realize is not a question asked before the struggle, but in the aftermath when we’ve already lost.

The trick, then, is to shrug off the Why?, stare past the carrotless string into the less-dark darkness ahead and make the first dragging, heavy steps to go forward again.

After a while, steps become less shuffling, the knees rise and an amble forms a gait. Without the carrot, what drives us? It certainly isn’t the stick. If we look out far enough, the stick disappears entirely. Beyond the triangular focus of the ghost of a carrot there is a horizon. There is your target; of impossible scope, unfixed, still always rolling away, still always unreachable, but unreachable by whatever trail one chooses

Eventually our ponderous mind tells us that without the carrot, without the limits of the dream, we are not lost. Without the carrot, we are free. In pursuit of a single carrot, along all this way, we have stepped over a great, limitless, neglected bounty, an over-spilling plenty our unspoken-for mouths are—and probably always have been—aching to sample. To taste or really, at last, to eat.