This "speech" I've "delivered" to my reflection in the mirror on this night November 2, 2005. Inspired by other dreams, I have taken considerable liberties to offer you this ode to the need for friendship and the equally great need for each of us to continue the quest to find ourselves ever closer to contentment. It is a thank you, a token and a promise ... and also a seemingly constant (or at least consistent) cry for help and inspiration.
Sometime seven years ago – back in the olden, golden times as a seemingly carefree high school senior -- a great teacher, whose ever-present smile remains etched in the corners of my weary mind, spoke to his students about going out into the world, finding what we loved and doing it. This momentous decree came across as sweet and as easily as the melodies from JT that played in our ears in class daily. Somehow the constant playing of the JT became a joyous respite that staved off the creeping in of the beckoning wide, wide world. But, seven years later, I face the tragic fact that the wide, wide world that once beckoned now seems to have me clenched in a tight, almost choking, hold.
Seven years later, my life in the wide, wide so-called real world is sadly crippled by the manacles of a 5-day work week and by the chains of paycheck to paycheck living. Seven years later, I lead a lonely existence in the midst of 8 million other lonely, working existences. Seven years later, I am languishing in the corners of my cubicle in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, and I find myself exiled from my own dreams.
So, I have come here to this page tonight to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense, I have come here before your reading eyes to throw down my gauntlet of sorts. When the gatekeepers of the real world – the principals and deans – presented us with diplomas and affirmative welcome-to-the-club handshakes, their warm smiles were smokescreens ushering us across the threshold of doom.
These diplomas and degrees were passed along as tickets – means to ends that circled around the warm and inviting hearth of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that these were just pieces of paper insofar that they could just as easily be eaten or burned or hung proudly upon our walls, and they would still be just as useless. Instead of being tickets to the future of promise and greatness and successes achieved, these papers now look like IOUs – we have been given bounced checks of sorts. We have followed along society’s path minding its institutions and structures, biding the passage of time, monitoring our strides against those of our peers, and many of us are now standing at a dead-end of sorts in what appears to be a maze. But we must refuse to accept the fact that this is all there is. We refuse to accept that we must work to live and live to work.
So we have come to cash in these IOUs – because we in fact are owed – and upon demand we seek to lay claim to our sanity (as we are too damn young to be losing it) and to the unyielding desires to be the cool sort of grown ups we’d planned and hoped to be – free. We come to each other to remind ourselves of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in “I woulds, but I can’ts;” nor is this a time to claim laziness as that’s too predictable and we swore that we’d never want to be that. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of discontent and restlessness to the sunlit path of basking in one’s own sunshine. Now is the time to turn to one another and give faith and assurance to our respective dreams and plans. Now is the time to lift those of us who feel sick and tired after a quarter-century (or so) of living to the solid rockin’ time that should be our own roaring 20s.
It would be fatal for us to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the power and validity of our dreams – those secret things we wish we were doing while we stare at our computer screens. This autumn with its dying leaves is giving way to winter’s retreat where we will nurture and regroup. However this is not an end, but a beginning. Those of us who need to rest and regroup should do so (so take a few days off), else there will be a losing of the minds (a “snapping” or a “losing it,” if you will) if we continue along our present paths. You know there will be neither rest nor tranquility if we continue to wake up feeling and complaining as we do each day.
The whirlwinding dreams of revolt will continue to gnaw at our consciousness until the final punch of the ol’ time clock frees us. But there is something that I must say to you, my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of fulfillment. In the process of gaining our rightful places, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds (read: do not cuss out one’s boss). Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking (too much) from the cup of bitterness (effin’ alarm clock) and hatred (effin’ pay-stubbin’ FICA).
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest upon these pages to degenerate into mere words. Again and again we must implore one another to rise to the majestic heights of meeting world weariness with spirited vivacity.
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed us must not lead us to distrust our “only-looking-out-for-your-best-interest” parents, families, colleagues and friends, for these, as evidenced by their presence within the very world that we are rising up against, are victims of the same circumstance, and though they will protest, in their hearts they know that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedoms (to be happy and loving whatever it is that they do or don’t do) are inextricably bound to our freedoms.
We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we will still walk and write and talk ahead together. We cannot, after this, turn back. There are those who are asking themselves, “When will you be satisfied?” we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of monotony, cannot gain rest in the living to work cycle. We cannot be satisfied as long as one job leads us to the same feeling of restlessness and want as the next. We can never be satisfied as long as one of our bright minds cannot comprehend how one will fill the day’s required hours and another talented spirit believes their ideas are wasting away unnoticed. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until we are fully paid in our self-fulfillments.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here from a great workday of trials and tribulations, admonitions and annoyances. Some of you have come fresh from those ubiquitous cubes. Some of you have come from offices where no door could stop work and its aggravations from finding you. You have been the veterans of stifling, cyclical suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive – and remember, too, that that which does not kills us makes us stronger. Go back to your offices, go back to your cubicles, go back to that 9-to-5, go back to your snooze buttons knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you tonight, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream, too.
I have a dream that one day this working business will be less about living and enduring and more about loving and enjoying. I have a dream that one day I won’t have to wake up to the blaring beep of my alarm (or the dat-blasted internal body clock that screams, “You’re late, you’re late, you’re late for an important date!”). I have a dream that one day when the clock strikes six thirty that I won’t have to silently shout to myself, “Yabba dabba damn do!” I have a dream that one day I can take my paycheck without having actually to check the pay in utter disbelief. I have a dream tonight. I have a dream that one day I will wake up, swing my legs off the side of the bed, stretch while smiling about what good and enthralling things await my attention, to be transformed into a person who views the world more through the eyes of “My, what’s in store for today …” rather than “Oh God, what is coming for me today?” I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day someone will ask me what kind of work do I do and my first response will be, not a sigh and an eye-roll of dread, but a sigh and an eye-widening of “How do I even begin to tell you of all that’s going on?!” This is my hope for myself. This is the faith with which I repeat, “To thine own self be true, dear.” With this faith I will not worry about making lemonade from lemons. With this faith I will not have to settle with promising myself that I won’t always hate working and that my friends won’t always hate it either. With this faith we will work together, pray together, laugh together, think together and grow together, knowing that we will all be free one day.
This will be the day when all of us skutters will be able to sing with a new meaning, “One thing can lead to another/It doesn’t take any sacrifice/Whoa father and mother and sister and brother/If it feels nice, don’t think twice just/Shower the people you love with love/Show them the way that you feel/Things are going to work out fine if you only will.” And if we are truly great, this must become true. So let’s love one another enough to encourage our dreams. Let’s love one another enough to implore that we seek our passions. Let’s love one another enough to lend shoulders to those who need to lean. Let’s love one another enough to say I’ll see you then and show up. Let’s love one another enough to always be there. But not only that; let’s love one another enough to just call and say I love you because …
When we let this love go, when we pass it on to each other through laughter, through getcha-through-the-day e-mails and IMs, when we send our love in care packages, we are able to say, “I see you. I feel you. I’m thinking of you. I hear you. I’m with you,” and we are reminded that we are not alone, that ours isn’t the only bad day we could be having, and that someone, too, is right alongside you on the journey, the seemingly interminable quest to do what you love and love what you do. Perhaps most importantly in all of this is to know that I get by with a little help from you friends, and that winter, spring, summer or fall, all you got to do is call, and I’ll be there, yeah, yeah, yeah … to believe in your dreams, too.