Daily Times

We all have dreams. Some of us let them slip away, others hold fast to them. My dream is to live peacefully far away in the mountains, with a small family and lots of animals one day after I’ve done all that I came to do in this world.

I dream to grow my own food, go on long walks, get water from the nearby stream. To communicate with birds, talk with sheep and laugh with dogs. To explore myself and the few people close to me and to love fully.

Life has a strange way of preventing you from achieving your innermost, deepest sought dreams and desires. You can fight it all you want, but will eventually fall into the cycle, the broken system that we all worship. We start off by working so we can pay for basic amenities. The scope of “basic amenities” then widens, and we need to work some more. In order to work some more, we develop various personas. We cannot trust everyone. We cannot like everyone. We start viewing others as a means to an end, as “products” determined according to status, wealth and looks, not human beings. Gradually, we forget ourselves, who we truly were once perhaps as children. It may have started as an interesting game, as life experience or experiment, but as the years pass by, our personas take over, and we actually start believing them.

Somewhere, in the back of their minds, children know they are just playing a game which is all make-believe. For us adults, however, there’s no one to tell us otherwise. We believe in the absurdity of money, something which does not have any tangible existence. If not money, we believe in “status,” reaching higher and higher positions of power, authority and influence.

We believe in devoting our lives to buying “Gucci” and “Versace;” utility products with the name of someone much more intelligent than us.

We work all year so we can buy a new car, which will get us to the same place at the same time; the latest mattress on which we sleep the same way; sofa on which we’ll sit the same way, television, which we’ll watch the same programs, or home, which will house (hopefully) the same family.

Rather than curing the problem, we target the resultant symptoms. Every third person I come across is on anti-depressants. Every second person has sleeping problems. The rest go to a weeklong yoga class or “spiritual talk,” to recharge for churning out the same monotonous existence for the rest of the year. Decade after decade, we go about the same meaningless existence; always trying to earn more money, get better jobs, relationships or luxuries. If we were immortal, it would have all made sense. Sadly, we are not, and try as hard as we might, in the end, we all see this make-believe to be just what it is: make-believe.

It is, indeed, tragic how we sum up the mysterious and ineffable thing that is life into neat little boxes. Anyone deviating from the norm is labelled as mentally unstable. A friend once believed in spirituality and disregard for money and was labelled as “bipolar” by doctors. As soon as he started making money, he was rediagnosed as “quite normal.”

The amount of money you make is inversely proportional to the level of your sanity

One friend used to be motivated and would have done anything to make it big. She moved to the States; grew bored with the routine and decided to find some other meaning in life.

She is now diagnosed as “clinically depressed.”

Apparently, the amount of money you make is inversely proportional to the level of your sanity.

Think outside the box but make money? You’re a genius!

Think outside the box but broke? Straight to the mental asylum!

We look at the madmen on the streets, the primitives in the forests as flawed, cut off from real life.

Could it be in fact the other way round?

What could be crazier than spending your entire existence running after cars and televisions, and then dying, without a shred of knowledge of the purpose of it all in the first place? Could it be the madmen and primitives are the ones on the real “true” path?

Most of the patients in mental asylums have very different views on life. For one, they are not competitive, malicious or manipulative. The reasons for their actions often are much more profound than the mundane ones for ours. They believe in destiny, fate, the miraculous, higher powers, magic. If what we make of life is only dependent on our perceptions, it would indeed be much more fulfilling to live a madman’s life. Many are harmless, and are only labelled as such and locked up because they threaten the very fabric of modern day society. We feel threatened by them, fundamentally because the very things we hold on to for our dear lives, they shun and laugh at. Madmen can see through our disguises, our premises, our personas and our elaborate “make-believe”.

I can only hope one day to live such a free life. To one day be able to experience the true magic, beauty and wonder of life that I know is there, just drowned out in the everyday noise of my thoughts. To one day roam freely the open forests, swim with countless fish and ducks and turtles, fly amongst the soaring eagles and climb the tallest mountains. To love not only each fibre of your being but each blade of grass, each petal of a flower and bark of a tree. To smell the fresh breeze and feel the delicate dewdrops dropping on your skin. That indeed must be the true dream of every man and woman. If only we would wake up.

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” Oscar Wilde

The writer is Ajoka Theatre Pakistan’s Deputy Director