I REMEMBER one cold and windy night when I was 15, lying on my small and stiff bed in the dark of night in Sekolah Menengah Sains Selangor, the boarding school I was attending.
I remember pulling up my blanket that night, trying to stay warm from the cool air that sneaked in through the windows of my dormitory.
The surroundings were eerily quiet, punctuated by the occasional symphony of insects combined with the gentle snoring of my dorm-mates.
Everyone was asleep but I remember lying there on the lower bunk bed, staring into the bottom of the bed above. It was the middle of the night but I was wide awake. I could not sleep because my mind was preoccupied with a favourite thought at that time.
Well, truth be told, it wasn’t just a thought. It was more like a dream that kept coming back whenever everything goes quiet and my thoughts, free from any distractions, would begin wandering by itself.
My mind would wander far and wide, exploring different places around the world, armed with the coolest gadgets and flying vehicles, all the crazy things that a 15-year-old would dream of but somehow in the end, it would always come back to the same thing.
In the end, my fantasies would always end with me playing a 3.7m Steinway grand piano surrounded by violins, violas, cellos, double basses, trumpets, trombones, saxophones and a solid rhythm section with kick-ass drums, bass and guitars.
The strings would be all around me. A solo violin would fly off into the stratosphere, the horn section would blast out an intricate harmony and I’d be totally lost in the music, and feeling extremely and sincerely happy.
Many years have now passed since that night. I’m now hurtling towards my mid-40s and the journey of life has taken me to places I’ve never thought I’d be, doing things I’ve never thought I would be doing and working with people who I never thought I’d meet.
I guess that applies to each and every one of us.
We dream crazy dreams when we are young, when no one tells us those dreams are impossible. We dream crazy dreams when no one tells us there are limits to what we can do.
At 15, we aren’t yet distracted by college. At 15, we don’t have colleagues laughing at our dreams, no bosses to tell us what we can or can’t do and our parents tolerate our crazy ideas with unconditional love.
When we enter the real world, get a job and have a family, life and its responsibilities, and rules would pummel its realities into our heart, stamping out any distant memory of any crazy teenage dream we ever had.
Life has a way of making us forget what we really want to do in the first place.
Think about this when you are going through life. Think about that when you’re in your endless meetings. Think about that when you fill your day with doing things that you never thought you’d be doing or worse, you never ever wanted to do in the first place.
Make that presentation, bind those documents, sign those memoranda of understanding, monitor those numbers, have those meetings... but try to remember why you stepped into the real world in the first place.
The world deserves to hear your crazy ideas and plans even though ironically, it tries to make you forget what they are.
The world may look like it doesn’t want to listen but it sorely needs creativity, originality and courage, which were so alive inside of you all those years ago.
And so when I go through all my routines and all the “things-to-do” lists in my notebooks, my thoughts will always go back to that cold and windy night all those years ago.
Never give up on your dream because I ain’t giving up on mine.
That orchestra is somewhere. I just need to step out and find it.
The writer is always lost. And that is good.
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