Plans And Dreams

Where will I be and who will I be ten years from now? This isn’t a very unique question. Most of us wonder where life will lead us.

There are people you meet who strongly advocate living each day as it comes. What’s the point in planning for the future, who knows what’s in store, they argue. And there are the dreamers who never stop thinking beyond the present day.

Many times confused to mean the same, plans are different from dreams. At some point of time they intermingle but per se, they are different. If I go just by the sound of it, a plan sounds like something concrete, attainable and dependable.  And dreams speak of anticipation, indulgence and the impossible. Yes, the sound of a word has a feeling that reaches you much before its denotation. 

And as different as they are from each other, one may lead to the other, automatically or not.

I always dreamed of settling down in my own city, the place I was raised, close to my family, in vicinity of my friends. I also dreamed of books, great writers and the magical words they wrote.

Years passed and dreams faded. Life happened and ambitions changed; an alteration of perspective and the path.

Plans began to form. A degree considered commercially viable (though my heart was always in the stories and pieces I read), steps towards a corporate career and the first sacrifice was made. It still did not perturb the way I lived because the place was where I wanted to be. And the days rolled by, happy and some, the paradigm shift was yet to come.

Tears dropped silently as I boarded the train, hand in hand with the love of my life. A home together was much more important than a house away from each other. We were young and the distance from our hometown was not too much, going back and forth every month would be manageable, I consoled myself.

The new city promised a better future, but was it the one I had dreamed off? Perhaps not. One step farther away and the only sound I could hear now was the echo of what I used to want to be.

How incredibly cruel that time sits still for some, those who wait painfully for things to change and come their way and for some others; it runs faster than they can hope to catch it.

The transition from the new city to the new country happened almost effortlessly, adaption they say is a wonderful quality that brings peace of mind to the displaced. The zeal and the vigor to visit discover and stay amid a different culture, an unseen world played its part too. 


So how far exactly have I come, I often asked myself. Did not matter, an inner voice replied, one step away is far enough. I let my plans overshadow my dreams.

And that’s when the resemblance between the two surfaced. Plans can backfire and dreams can return to haunt you. Plans or dreams, whatever it was, it was nothing short of a wakeup call for me.

Five years back, I picked up a pen and a piece of paper, imagined I was in school and had been told to write an essay. The pen flowed, slowly at first and soon picking up momentum, just as it did then.

Fortunately that is all there is to how I started writing AGAIN. No drama, no suspense, no tragedy either! My article “A New Beginning” was published in SPARKS on 5^th December, 2011, possibly the best thing to happen in the last month of the year!

You can read it at - http://www.sparkthemagazine.com/?p=2836