Dreaming, Hoping, Daring

Our paths in life could be straight and predictable, but when are they ever?

Photo by Alex Alvarez on Unsplash

I know it’s a cliché, but “if you can dream it, you can do it” – I believe in that!

You need to know the details, though, as it isn’t as you might think from the words alone. You see, clichés are based on life. All of it, condensed into very few words to say something about something, that will make you think a bit.

A cliché isn’t meant to tell it all. So if you find that it is superficial, it’s because you’ve forgotten to fill in the blanks.

Blanks.

That’s life.

Like one of those tests where some words are missing in a text, and you should try to find some that’ll fit. That’s life. Finding the words that fit. The test itself is a cliché, and you fill it in, thereby discovering the full meaning of it all.

Not that life necessarily has a meaning, but you can give it one, if you want. Most people seem to want that. Others are truly mindful and can manage to just take every second as it appears, enjoying the wonders that minutes can bring, making a rich day out of the lot.

But most of us have dreams, plans, and wishes. And they stay that way until we do something, as dreams do not come true just by themselves. You’ll have to dare, invest, give something, in order to get a chance to get back what you want. You’ll have to buy a lottery ticked to get the chance to win the lottery.

Or you can choose to consider everything that appears as a win in the lottery that you yourself is the ticket to. The lottery of you, the one that you for sure will always win, but with unknown prices.

The last few days led to some discoveries for me. In a way, as part of my mandolin journey that I have written about in other articles, but also next to that. As you may have discovered, any journey isn’t very interesting in itself, it is merely a matter of keeping an eye and a thought on everything you’ll pass along the way. The flowers in the dike, the trees a bit further away, and the mountains or the ocean behind – whatever is there. And what is happening. Life is not a photo, it’s moving. A butterfly lands carefully on a fragile flower to have a snack, and birds are dancing in the air, having newly found each other and being so happy that they just can’t sit still.

Knowing that there’s a lot more happening than you can see should make you feel some level of respect. Respect for life and all that’s in it. For the way in which it is so big and yet, consists of only small things. The bigness is in your mind only, the connectedness is for you to feel that you understand. For you to have something to label, group, remember.

Some of my discoveries were uplifting, some were sad. Some were both.

An example of the last category was called Lhasa.

Was, because she died young. A girl deciding to become a singer, then doing it, having a completely new take on what singing actually means. A true genius and artist, making some of the most amazing music I’ve ever heard. And for some reason I just never heard of her, until now. Or, that is, I just never knew that I’d heard of her, because diving into her music and collaborations made me understand that I did hear about her, being one of those butterflies along the way, or maybe a bird – or the ocean – which I just didn’t understand until now.

Lhasa died from cancer, 37 years old. That was 15 years ago, and I found out about that just after having found out what magical music she made. Like flying high, then discovering that the wings can’t carry me, and then dropping like a stone.

It’s sad, but it’s also interesting. I have written before about the sometimes depressing nature of many artists, I like, are dying. Of course, we are all going to die, so it shouldn’t feel that special, but it does. And that has made me consider that there may be a natural reason for humans to hunt for youth. We become fans of young musicians or sports people, enjoy the look of “young” in ads. I always thought that it was about nostalgia, the revival of a memory of when we were there ourselves, but I understand now how it may be the opposite: the hope of these idols outliving us. Because we cannot handle well to see how people we care about are dying, and that makes us seek out some young ones with less risk of being ripped away from us before we are ready for it.

Only, in some cases, that trick doesn’t work. It didn’t with Lhasa, who was lost much too early.

Another discovery is Souad Massi, a woman from Algeria, who also became a singer. She was born about the same time as Lhasa, and luckily, we still have her with us. Some of what makes her special, more than everybody in this world is special, is her way of singing in both her native Berber language, in Arabic, and many other languages, of which some are quite complicated to fit to some of the music styles she is singing, but she does it anyway.

She dares. And her life has been a lot about daring, as some people felt it okay to threaten her on her life, basically because she was a woman who wanted to sing. Or something. I don’t always get what makes some people believe that they should be the judges of other people’s lives, deciding what another person wants to do with her life.

Souad Massi dares to sing all those genres that are not fit for her original culture, and she dares to sing in languages that are somewhat awkward at times for the task – and it makes her expression very strong.

She is strong because she dares. People tend to believe that they need to be strong in order to dare to do something, but it works the other way around. The expression of strength appears as a result of what you do. It is not something you bring into the equation, it’s the result of it.

The world takes some turns now and then, and it has led to many bad things happening during history. People have behaved in ways that are beyond imagination, and often worse than anyone ever did before them. Colonies are in that end of the specter, because even though the idea of having a colony isn’t by concept bad, it has had bad consequences for very many people.

Colonies have basically been an expression of capitalism, a matter of finding low-cost ways of producing something. Be it sugar, timber, or spice. As always with capitalism, this could have been done in a good way, to the benefit of everybody involved – a collaboration with all parties as winners. But, also as always, it wasn’t. Colonies always led to slavery and other forms of mistreatment of other people, and it led to some of the parties getting all the benefits, while others got all the trouble and misery.

Algeria was a French colony, and one of the turns, life took on this, was that France could now become a safe haven for Souad Massi, who lives and works from there now, having dared to move to some place else, to escape from a culture that didn’t understand her, didn’t allow her to dream and hope. But she dared to break away, and she could, because the old colony power could serve as an escape route.

My mandolin journey has crossed paths with the destinies of two remarkable women, even though we are in different dimensions. They are now known anchors in my universe, and this way, their dreams and hopes become mine, their dares become my win.

We make the connections. The universe is ours to shape. I have made room for these two stars, now participating in both guiding me across the sea at night, and affecting me by gravity and their curbing of the universe, which I let them do, now seeing how other things are attracted to the areas around these centers of gravity.

Not predictable at all, but it does carry a lot of weight. Two blanks filled in, adding a lot of meaning.