Imagine an old-style gramophone playing “When You Wish Upon A Star” from Disney’s Pinocchio…
When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you
If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do
Fate is kind
She brings to those to love
The sweet fulfillment of
Their secret longing
Like a bolt out of the blue
Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true……….
…and now imagine the needle scratching across the record as it abruptly comes to a halt.
When you wish upon a star, you’re a few million lightyears late.
That star is dead.
Just like your dreams.
Because, laws of astrophysics aside, this sort of dreaming is unlikely to come true. It’s living in a dream world, not the real world.
Fate is not just going to step in and see you through to getting anything your heart desires. For example, my heart desires more compassion, empathy and integrity in government, business and the media, but I couldn’t be serious wishing upon the Dog Star for that.
As I wrote in my previous post, you can effectively kill your dreams by believing someone else has the answers, that the fault is someone else’s, and by believing in overnight success.
You can also kill your dreams by wishing upon a star, and sitting back and believing that fate will deliver, that the universe owes you. Turning your dreams into reality involves effort, doing stuff instead of just thinking about it. As as has been attributed to St Ignatius: “Pray as if everything depends on God, work as if everything depends on you.” And as Thomas Edison put it: “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
