Is It REAL?: A Garden of Captivity

When do our own dreams become our shackles? A dream is an impulse that pulls us out of our comfort zone. A dream is a horizon-we see it, we strive for it, and it compels us to move. It is an idealized picture of our future that gives meaning to the efforts we make in the present. And as long as this image of our dream remains flexible, it will be a source of strength. But sometimes, we rigidly fixate on our dream, and then, what should have been a guiding star becomes something that demands absolute obedience.

We spend years building a career following our dream. But life flows, we change, priorities shift, new interests emerge, new people, different needs. What mattered at 20 may not matter at 40. But by that point, we have invested so much into achieving our dream that giving up on the plan is tantamount to admitting that all the previous years were a mistake. The dream, underpinned by the investment of time and resources, now holds us hostage. It's a paradox: what was supposed to free us now limits our choices.

We start avoiding opportunities that could bring us greater satisfaction, simply because they don't fit into the ideal plan. We give up a new hobby or ignore new relationships... Dreams become shackles when we lose the ability to revise them. To free ourselves means realizing that we created this dream ourselves, and therefore we can rewrite it or let it go altogether! True freedom is not in achieving a specific goal, but in the ability to choose our path at every step!