Dream and hope

Have you ever throw yourself upon a moment, feeling and believing that all in the world belong to you? Perhaps it’s like the moment when you are in love for the first time, or when you have full confidence in your future.

I have had this at least once, like when I fell head-over-heels in love some years ago. Even he said, “You truly live here and now!” (benar-benar hidup di kini dan di sini) since I just opened my heart without any fear, without any reservation. Ignoring the impossible future, I would “bravely” cited Kahlil Gibran: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. [And] …The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. :-D Well, no wonder it was certainly very painful then, afterwards. :-D

Nevertheless, when everything has been over and I look back, I still can recognize how precious the moment was - that I could get courage and endurance from the confidence in what I believed, that I was enabled to come out of myself and did things that I normally would not do.

Once my friend and I was talking about and enjoying our comfort of living in a developed country (we’re both temporary immigrants, a.k.a. foreign students). Then suddenly he said, “Someday, our country will be like this.” I was struck by the confidence in his words. He even didn’t bother to explain further or to back up his statement with many theories. It was like a plain and simple truth for him. I know he and other people are working toward it. For many others, this is a dream that might come true in 50 (or 100?) years. For him, this is a dream that is already happening.

The word dream has an implication of something happening in the (very) long future, hopefully still in our life time. There are people who are said as having no dream anymore. There are also people who are still able to talk about their wishes, or at least about betterness. I have been proud with myself before, thinking that I am a better person when I can say that I am still able to dream. But is that enough?

The sermon last Sunday was about faith and hope. Although the preacher meant it for faith to Christ, for me his lesson is true for mortal affairs also. Faith is believing in a promise. Hope is the confidence that the promise will actually come true. It is, perhaps, easy to just blindly believe in something. It is more difficult to actually hope, having confidence in what I believe. When I believe in my dream, would I be able to sacrifice my comfort to reach it? Would I calculate the effort-reward ratio for my dream? When do I actually expect my dream to come true: in the long (undefined) future, never (not in my life time), or just now?

There were moments in my past when I felt and behave like a little child, holding on what she believed and actually truly lived in it - so, also having no questions or calculations. There were moments also when I felt old, not so much because I was trying to sound knowing, but because at the same time I was bitter. For the moment, I am an old woman learning again to become a little bit like that little girl from my past, having faith and hope in what I believe. A dream is happening along our ways when it is embedded in our day-to-day works toward it. It is part of here and now, and time doesn’t matter anymore.