Wake Up! It’s a Dream

Life is a carousel, spinning faster than anyone can comprehend. It looks incredibly fun; all the lights, all the joy, the music, the laughs, flashing by but not past you. It’s all within reach, but you are not on it. It’s not for you – you’re above, or below it; you are better than that, or undeserving of it. How can the people on the carousel laugh like that while the world burns? Or is the fire consuming those of us who have not paid our dues, or earned our place on the carousel? You decide.

Life is a carousel, but only if you believe it to be. It’s shiny, it’s dreamy, it’s beautiful because you’re not on it. A carousel is what you were told life is: a joyful ride with that price tag. So what do you do if you don’t pay the fee? You do not live.

If life is a carousel, you will spend all the time in the world trying to earn, cheat, manipulate your way onto it. Scrape your knees, muddy your fingernails, rot your soul for the ride, and maybe you make it. Yet, when you do, you will have to face the grave question: is this all there is? Going round and round, flashing by (but not past), all that you have left behind; your former self, the bodies you stepped over to get there, the ties you cut for this shiny reward.

Life is not the carousel. The world is on fire, the economy is in crisis, and it’s all anyone can talk about publicly. It’s all bad, and sad, and terrible, and doomed, and hopeless, and if you ignore it, you’re insensitive, yet if you partake in it, you’re socially conscious and applauded for it. Our waking lives are all online, and everyone is a star, so – being in the spotlight – you have to say something about everything. That is the carousel. That is not life.

Life is in the cracks and crevices, the deep breath you let out when the lights go off, the skin you slide off when no one is watching, the world behind your eyelids when you shut them. Life is when you let all that is bad pass through you, feel it, live it instead of trying to fight it, life is what gets you up when it puts you down, and you can still let the good in. Life does not happen to you, life is for you to live. 

So, take that deep breath, step out of the light, close your eyes, and dream, knowing that what happens in the dark is as important. Knowing that the good that takes place in the imagination is as possible as the bad that takes place in reality. And when you step back out, hold your head up high, and go as a dream.

It’s the 7th of August, and I’m sitting on a park bench on a cliff, overlooking a suburb and the city beyond it. I think about what it has taken me to get here; the dreams my parents had for me that I abandoned, the loneliness of disappointment, the pain of falling and the strain of getting back up. I think about the pressure of a day job, and the check that keeps me going (into debt, out of home, into a car), and the doors that “making a living” has opened for me. I’m sitting here as the clock ticks to my next shift, and it’s a reality I could have never imagined. 

Yet, it’s a reality that is a dream to many. I drive around the area before I head to work, and I’m amazed to see that there are homes here. The houses on the hills, another dream (a dream that may have been mine once upon a time), all quiet, on treelined streets, with balconies overlooking the city below them. I don’t wonder what the residents of this place had to do to get here, at the top of the mountain, onto the carousel. I imagine what it’s like to look down at everyone else trying to achieve their life. What do they see? Envy, wonder, hope, disdain? I find it hard to envision myself as one of them, because I neither know nor want to know what they think of everyone down there: in the mud, in endless office hours, or no office to clock into at all.

Down there is where I feel most at home. Down there is where I was raised, where what little we had never stopped us from dreaming. Where I got into a stranger’s car after I missed my school transport and made it safe and sound. Where my aunt turned an RDP into a daycare that runs to this day. Where my uncle built us wire cars from whatever material left over from the odd jobs he worked. Yet, in all that mundane beauty, staying there meant being stagnant.

So down there lost the brilliant minds and talent it had because we were told to dream big, and that big meant away from it all. When making do with what we had was not enough, ambition made us abandon all that was good down there for a chance to get onto the carousel.

Our government and municipalities have failed us for several reasons, but I think our collective view of the townships and villages we come from is the worst failure. We got a little higher up the ladder and decided anyone below us refused to face reality (study hard, work hard, make it out). We are not peers anymore, everyone around you is either above or below you, so we become insidious. Always looking for a way up, never looking down because the person below you wants what you have, right? And so there is no collective anymore. 

That is, if you allow it to die.

I am sitting in my flat at the end of my shift with so much doubt, and fear. I have so many responsibilities, so much to do, so much to learn. Yet, I know now –  more than ever before – that my dreams are not to be folded neatly and put away at the start of my day. My dreams are not of a house on the hills, or shiny things and finite thrills. I dream of letting myself be human again. And I know I am not alone. You are not alone. You never have been.