The Tragedy Of Big Dreams

Tragedy of big dreams! Yes that’s something to think about.

Not on few occasions have I overheard some of my undergraduate students talk to each other excitedly about their big dreams. They want to become big money-earners, top CEOs and owners of properties of high value. I often can’t help smiling hearing all these optimistic ambitions from the youngsters. Few of them will attain the goal, or something close to it, depending on how lucky they become with the wealth distribution dynamics of our capitalist world which ensures such amount of wealth gets only to so few. For others, it will end up as one of those dreams…

Yes, one of those “big” dreams that become smaller with time. Years ago after my NYSC programme, I encountered someone who, like me, was just fresh from the national service and into the ranks of after-school job seekers. He said to me, “When I was in school, my plan was to, once after my NYSC programme, quickly secure a job paying about N150, 000 monthly which I would manage for the time being until a better paying job arrives. But now, I can’t even find a job paying as little as N30, 000.” My new friend’s dream was quite a big one – securing a job of N150, 000 salary as an interim engagement in 2007! That was when the national minimum wage was less than N10, 000! Today, by my reckoning, it is like a fresh school leaver dreaming to secure and be “managing” a job that pays over N500, 000 monthly while waiting for the.real deal. I was amused at my friend’s expectations. But then, that is how we start off dreaming big and only for the “big” dream to end up shrinking into a quite “small” dream when reality begins to dawn us. Most humans, at the later stages of their life, would have a similar story to tell if they take a sincere reckoning of their life’s journey.

I once heard a relative of mine who had unsuccessfully searched for a child several years after marriage shout a word of prayer, “God if you can give me even just one child irrespective of the sex…” This is a very beautiful lady who must have nursed big dreams of her marital life, how her marriage would be a blissful one blessed with lovely children now settling for “just one child” of any sex. And when she eventually has a girl child, it was like heaven visiting.

We do not appreciate “little” gifts life offers to us until we have spent so much time and energy unsuccessfully pursuing “big” things. (Note that I have kept “big” and “small” in quotes in order to highlight the foolishness in the way we often measure gifts of life). I know someone who dropped out of medical school due to something as “simple” as constant headaches. Pay attention to the irony: something as “simple” as headaches – but it was constant and destabilizing enough to force her to abandon her journey to becoming a physician, having studied for three good years and just commencing the clinical stage of her training. Until we have a similar experience as this girl, we may not view being free from headaches as a “big” gift of life.

Unlike most of us, this girl must have realized how big a gift it is to have been able to wake up and spend the entire day without having headaches. If, as a child, she had seen what awaited her in future, she must have appreciated why being free from headaches should have been part of her “big” dreams growing up. The same applies to my relative who must have seen how big a blessing having “just” a girl child after marriage is. She was no longer under our collective delusion of counting the blessings of marriage by the number or sex of children born. (In particular, I wish our society will awaken in wisdom to do away with the inhumane practice of sex selectiveness in childbirth).

Importantly, even when we realize our “big” dream, there are always two possible scenarios that follow. The first one is that we never stop dreaming. We soon after move on to even “bigger” dreams, and when we think we have realized this also, a “much bigger” dream starts occupying our mind, and it goes on without an end. Billionaire mogul Dangote once said that even though he desired to be rich, he never saw himself becoming as rich as he eventually became, but then having attained all that wealthy, his ambition is to keep having more. There is no better evidence to the truth of this than the fact that the Kano State-born entrepreneur has never stepped back on making more and more investments. This is what happens to all of us; anytime we realize any of our dreams, the achievement will no longer seem as “big” as the dream itself was. Thus, whatever we have just achieved (wealth, education, marriage, career etc ) begins to seem ordinary and we then start yearning for something “better” and “bigger.”

The other possible scenario is that the “big” dream may end up not being as sweet as it promised. Thus, that marriage of yours may turn out to be a hell on earth; that career may become a source of too much physical and mental stress for you; that child you gave birth to may turn out an unbearable source of agony as a result of ill health or even death. A family I knew at Onitsha lost their only two sons who were into armed robbery and were killed by Bakassi boys in the early 2000s. The poor parents must have traveled the unimaginably torturing route of having so much joy at begetting male children to the agony of watching them turn into criminals and ultimately the insufferable grief of having them slaughtered on the street like fouls.

In all, the better approach to life is to always have the disposition to treasure the “little” gifts of life. This should not be as a matter of last resort (after our “big” dreams have failed us) but as a matter of how to live from day to day. We would be happier if we always count our today’s blessings with full appreciation rather than looking down on what we have in pursuit of what we do not have. This is how to be self-contented. This is how to be happy.

This is my meditation this midweek.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria.