What is the dream that gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps you going when there’s no evidence that you’re ever going to ‘make it’? For those who live their life in the pursuit of actualising a dream a la The Alchemist, each moment is an encounter with God.
Each individual has his or her own unique dream. And yet, our dreams all collide with each other’s. We are part of someone else’s dreams and they are a part of ours. No dream actualised is ever the work of a solo creator. There are many that must come together for its manifestation from thought-form into tangible-form.
Firstly, there is the journey that prepares us for the destination. The various people and players we must meet along our path there. Some will be us for a short time, others for a longer period–but our true soul family is always with us; lifetime after lifetime, incarnation after incarnation.
Sometimes they appear to us in our dreams and in our memories to guide us–even after they’ve left this world. We believe that they are trying to make contact and show us the way forward. Sometimes all we get is a gentle warning. Don’t walk this road.
One must heed such advice.
The Quest
The quest for meaningful work is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. As more people remain unmarried or marry late, choose not to have children or choose to have only one child; and as we progress towards a more equitable society–the greatest challenge of all has become the quest for meaningful work.
Long gone are the days of the iron rice bowl, when work was something we did to pay the bills and provide for our families. Long gone are the days when creating a business was done solely to generate profit or create a means through which we could provide for ourselves.
As work becomes the sole anchor of our lives, more and more people are seeking to carve out their identities through the work that they do. The quest for meaningful work is not just a fad of our age, though. It is more that in our age, what we do for work has taken centre stage in an unprecedented way. In other ages, we perhaps had different dreams. Perhaps ‘meaningful work’ is the dream for our generation. The generation that marries late, has children late, and ‘settles down’ late.
We are no longer betrothed to be married at a young age as we once were. We see starting a family as an impediment to our own personal goals.
Organisations now have to provide more than just a job that pays the bills. It has been a challenge of the 21st century, for corporations to work that PR machine in order to convince their employees that they are indeed doing meaningful work. At the same time, however, cynicism directed towards corporations has not waned, but strengthened.
For some reason, people have come to believe that they need to have a day job and a side hustle. That we shouldn’t fully commit ourselves to anything at all. In a world full of options, we are not making any choices at all.
Commitment
We have been taught to shy away from commitment. We believe, erroneously, I might add, that it limits and restricts us. Perhaps we need these limitations so that we may succeed in achieving our true dream; instead of all the false dreams that are sold to us through glossy advertising.
We all know, deep down, that the picture is not as beautiful as it looks, but we still want it. We crave it. We lust after it. After a brief taste, we realise that we don’t like it. It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
At this point, we begin to seek more meaningful work. Instead, we should seek more meaningful lives. Our lives cannot be meaningful if all we do is work. It’s not just as simple as working at a place that allows for work-life balance. Neither is it about having a family.
It is about creating a home. A place of one’s own. It is about creating a web of dreams that is held up by others who also dream the same dream.
It is about becoming a weaver of dreams.
The Mercantile 