If I Was

Re-runs of Back to the Future films bring back scarily reminiscent images of the 1980s—a really wonderful time to be alive. I’ve been thinking. How important is it for each of us to be connected with our inner selves? To our dreams I mean. It’s our circumstances that seem to drive our desires to want to be something... anything. What is it our hearts say?

We’re all experts, specialists, champions in the making. That’s our heart’s desire. We can’t escape this. (If you think I lie, why is it film and music and reality television major on this fact?—they’ve got us all sussed out.)

Yet, we’re divergent to the incontrovertible pull of this desire. If we can’t have what we think we truly want—if it’s out of our conscious reach, and it so often is—we cannot stand it and we start to reject our heart’s desire. We are then way less than ourselves. This describes us all.

To have our lofty dreams go unrealised is obviously a huge disappointment to us. Midge Ure’s If I Was (1985) captures the essence of this fact rather saliently, yet his specific dream is love and he’s prepared to go to any lengths to impress her. It’s also a preparedness to go extrinsic to meet an intrinsic need... a departure to enter... a divergence to converge. Travelling far to find what’s near. It’s maddening. We all do it.

Apart from the brilliantly chilly and sombrely reflective music in If I Was, I think it portrays something we’ve lost—the dream we once had. It’s like Enya’s, Orinoco Flow (1988). The song brings us to our dreaming. We’re lost from our vastly disappointed selves for even five minutes while we turn it up in pumping stereo. It takes us to a halfway land of the soul. A place we sail pleasant vistas. Far from the boredom of reality, unmet desires and imaginings.

Do we get the point?

Our destiny is important. We’re here for a reason and only our hearts truly know. Connecting to the dream is entirely possible, now. Without delay we can re-connect. We can become ourselves.

“Carry me on the waves to the lands I’ve never been, carry me on the waves to the lands I’ve never seen.”

Transcending our past and paving our futures in hope, we sail. The Orinoco flow of our hearts will take us there if we choose not to give up on the dream; we either fly or die. The dream takes us where we’ve neither been nor seen.

Turn up dreamy songs and dream big, breathing in hope and wonder for a new day, today.

If I was me I’d be happy.

We all make far too many comparisons. We live other people’s dreams and not our own. Yet, we could be happy right now if only we truly defined what our dreams are and chased them.

Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971) gets the very last word...

“There are two paths you can go by, but in the long run... There’s still time to change the road you’re on.”

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.