We currently do not have a national fantasy- a national dream. Frankly, most of us don’t have individual dreams, either. This is an important gap in our society, which I attribute to the sociopathic and competitive atmosphere in the areas of commerce and politics, as well as the “programming” I discussed in “Part One: Ditch the Illusions”.
I used to do a workshop with at-risk kids, kids in drug rehabs, and some adults in transition- where I’d teach them how to envision a set of goals and then work backwards from those “ultimate” goals to where they were at the time. I was teaching them to create a dream-map. I had them do it in the form of a mandala- something beautiful they could hang on the wall as a reminder- but the new way of thinking was the most important part of the process.
Before talking about anything else, I’d hold up a bag of chips and a dollar bill- back then, you could still buy a bag of chips for a dollar- and I’d explain that the dollar bill was a tool that one could use for acquiring the chips, but that one couldn’t EAT the dollar bill. I’d explain that in the project we were doing, acquiring vast piles of dollar bills was not an acceptable goal, but only a means towards the actual things they wanted.
When money is removed from our dream-making process, we suddenly realize that it’s not the only tool in one’s tool bag. The dream-making becomes more open to creativity and improvisation. If I want a beautiful patchwork quilt on my bed, I can go work to earn money to buy a quilt in a store, or I can learn to quilt and collect the fabrics to build one myself, or I can trade my ditch-digging ability to a quilter who needs a ditch, or I can ask my friend who’s getting rid of an old quilt if I can have hers and fix it up. In any of the above cases, I get my quilt. In only one of them do I use money to get it.
A side note: in every case, from the “worst” inner-city kids who were in a drug rehab to the adults who were already relatively successful, the top of the wish-list was a loving family and a happy home. In every case.
Most of these kids had never been given permission to dream about their future before. They certainly weren’t encouraged to actively consider making their dreams a reality, nor were they given tools to create a map for themselves. These kids, given this process for making their dreams manifest, took the ball and ran. One young man in the drug rehab even went on to become a counselor himself. All it took was a way to wed hope to practical thinking processes. That’s what mapping the dream is about.
One other thing I explained is that we don’t often hit a bullseye in our efforts to reach our goals. Frequently life knocks us into new directions and changes our priorities. We can think of our ideal destinations as lights on high mountaintops, far in the distance, that ultimate destination we’re aiming for. We can then see smaller goals as mileposts along the way, and course adjustments as natural to the traveling process.
We can’t just jump into mapping the national dream- we have so many different aspirations flying about and so few cartographers in these times. But if lots of us, all over the country, begin to draw maps from where we sit, and then start joining them together, we can all cover a lot of ground.
Take a step:
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