REAL life, REAL problems

     I borrow the words a good friend told me once. "Wake up. This is REAL life with REAL problems". This exact phrase is ringing in my mind for months now. It has been tranformed in my mind many times too. Sometimes the phrase itself calls me to abandon my dreamworld and use whatever power I have left to make something useful, to live the rest of my life. Proabably that was the intention of the person who told me this. Not to waste a life, into inactive dreams who (it's true) incapasitate all the strength and the power of someone's character. But on the other side there is another voice says "What if the people with the REAL problems don't even know that there is another life beyond the visible?. What if they are also stuck in a dream (the so-called American dream), which they have baptized REAL life?".My problem was (and still is) that I always saw life like a fairy-tale. Maybe fairy-tales are supposed to have a happy ending, but they also have a higher meaning hidden behind the stories and the words. My fairy-tale was not, and probably will never be such. Yet in every fairy-tale there always is a "happily ever after". I blame REAL people only for one thing. They don't care about the happily ever after. They only care for the "happily today". In parrarel with fairy-tales, when the "happily ever after" occurs all the characters are finally "happy" (except the bad guy of course). In REAL life's "happily today", only one individual is happy. And since life itself does have a sarcastic, twisted and poetic kind of justice, the happy individual finds out that living for yourself will only lead you to living by-yourself (usually surrounded by friend-liches and a blown out of proportions bank account). Of course the poetic injustice also strikes the dreamers. Living your life with a high ideal (be it in personal or any other level) is a lonely road. Sometimes a dead end road. A rocky mountainous windy road where the peak is always hidden in the clouds. I'd say that this is the cost for having high hopes and ideals. But it might be not much of a curse in the end. Cause if finally you reach that peak (being the fullfilment of those ideals one way or another) you will understand that it was worth the pain and effort. Someone who completes his path to the heaven of dreams is no better than any other. He is just the one who held tight to his beliefs. The one who wielded a sword and ran into the heat of the battle, while others stood on high hill with their bows never really used. It's he who lasted longer.


     The thing is that I always refused to see life as REAL. It's kind of strange to explain. It's all about dreaming. I used to grow up and see children around me saying "I dream to become this when I get old". Scientists,singers,actors,soccer stars...Children have such an imagination when it comes to dreaming. But like Pink Floyd said in one of their songs, "The child has grown, the dream is gone". That's what real life does. It gets our dreams "gone". Sometimes wipes them entirely from our minds. Sometimes keeps them hidden in a dusty attic up in our minds. While we grow up, we have to embrace reality. Meaning we have to compromise with everyone and everything. We have to train hard to become professionals usually in a field where later we get to hate, and just keep doing it conventionally for the sake of money. Even if it is not (only) for money in the end we keep on doing it, forever and ever.

     I had to lose my job, to understand that we live a life praising only a material thing called "money". Money brings comfort and safety. Money makes the world go round. But it puts our life into a halt. It puts our minds,our free thinking and will into a halt. Not even a halt. It puts us running in the rat race, running endlessly like guiny pigs inside a cage over and over again the same wheel. With no beginning or end. No reassess. No time to catch a breath. And then I had to live for some months in poverty, with no job and future so that I could finally understand that there is more to life than money. I had to compromise with everything only to see that the mind of a person who does not live in this God forsaken so-called REAL life, does not compromise. That mind is alive and active, and sometimes it takes all the humiliation and the pain of the word to effectively activate it. I've learned that when your mind does not compromise it is always wounded. And like in human body when we are wounded the whole body is in full alert. It was and still is difficult. Cause living like this surely takes away you every strength, no matter how strong you might be. Many different "bad" ideas settle in your mind when you have to live on the edge of the REAL world. And loneliness (both mental and physical) is a very heavy burden to bare.


     I also had to lose something else. I had to find love. True love. And I was sure that even if I could never get any other dream come true, I would at least get the chance to make the dream of a real healthy and full of loving relationship come true. In REAL life, it ended even before it had started. In my "dream" life it is still alive. It lives. It is like said an open wound. It still fights for the very same ideal. Love does fight indeed, every other single thought and feeling. It defends what it believes. It refuses to surrender, it refuses to compromise, it refuses to bargain with anyone and for anything. And TRUE love is a dream on it's own. It's not a coincidence that so many movies,songs and books have been written in the name of love. And I do believe that in many of such cases it was not even TRUE love but only a passing passion (which is of course strong indeed).


     What is REAL life then? Life is as REAL as we want it to be. After all we all see it differently. I have chosen the road of belief and the road of dreaming high. Wrong or right it doesn't matter. Although it does hurt like hell, I feel comfortable in it. To end I will only borrow lyrics of another song from Aerosmith called "Dream On"........
     - "Sing with me, sing for the year. Sing for the laughter, sing for the tear. DREAM ON.DREAM ON. Dream until your dream comes true".