When I was in New York two years ago I stumbled across a wooden ramp pushed up against the sidewalk - a hurried, makeshift arrangement put in place by a delivery guy to enable his wheeled trolley to move freely to and from the delivery truck. On it, someone had scrawled in big letters: “BECOME YOUR DREAM”.
I stood for several minutes, considering and photographing this piece of impromptu street graffiti, oblivious to the delivery guy passing repeatedly in front of me. Eventually, he said jovially “Hey buddy – you look a lot like Lee Majors. Anyone ever tell you that?”
As an Englishman in New York, the comparison was oddly comforting. It reminded me of home – not the bricks and mortar or green-and-pleasant lands I know as the UK – but of my childhood home. The home where my dreams were dreamed in all their glory without the wing clipping device we all know as “reality” getting its unwelcome blades in the way of my exploring fingers. I grew up watching The Bionic Man, a man who was a super-man in the true sense of the word. This was not a man from outer-space, energised by a green-glowing icicle, nor a gnarled, tattooed mini-superman energised by a green vegetable known mysteriously as “spinach”… No; this man was built. We built him. He was a broken man and we rebuilt him.
You will notice that the graffiti did not say “Achieve” your dream, or “Dream” your dream, or “Go for” your dream. It said “”become” your dream. Become it. If we become something, we change. It has a sense of possession and of ownership about it. The thing itself no longer exists, because we have become it. Not only has it changed, we have changed too. In many ways it is the purest form of alchemy – two separate states becoming each other and creating a third, singular, and changed, state.
So to that delivery guy, who bestowed upon me a fleeting kudos that I neither deserve nor could ever generate of my own accord, I say “Thank you”. In that single moment, that serendipitous, spontaneous, unexpected moment, you defined exactly what it means to Become Your Dream. Life, inevitably, breaks us down. Each day, in tiny ways, something of us is taken, or breaks, or decays. It is the nature of the human beast. For us to do anything, even before we dream, we must learn how to repair. We must learn how to be emotionally bionic and where we cannot repair ourselves we must seek out others who can do the repair for us. We are all broken in our individual ways, and the delicate skill of self-repair is what, ultimately, will really allow us to become our dream.
I stood for several minutes, considering and photographing this piece of impromptu street graffiti, oblivious to the delivery guy passing repeatedly in front of me. Eventually, he said jovially “Hey buddy – you look a lot like Lee Majors. Anyone ever tell you that?”
As an Englishman in New York, the comparison was oddly comforting. It reminded me of home – not the bricks and mortar or green-and-pleasant lands I know as the UK – but of my childhood home. The home where my dreams were dreamed in all their glory without the wing clipping device we all know as “reality” getting its unwelcome blades in the way of my exploring fingers. I grew up watching The Bionic Man, a man who was a super-man in the true sense of the word. This was not a man from outer-space, energised by a green-glowing icicle, nor a gnarled, tattooed mini-superman energised by a green vegetable known mysteriously as “spinach”… No; this man was built. We built him. He was a broken man and we rebuilt him.
You will notice that the graffiti did not say “Achieve” your dream, or “Dream” your dream, or “Go for” your dream. It said “”become” your dream. Become it. If we become something, we change. It has a sense of possession and of ownership about it. The thing itself no longer exists, because we have become it. Not only has it changed, we have changed too. In many ways it is the purest form of alchemy – two separate states becoming each other and creating a third, singular, and changed, state.
So to that delivery guy, who bestowed upon me a fleeting kudos that I neither deserve nor could ever generate of my own accord, I say “Thank you”. In that single moment, that serendipitous, spontaneous, unexpected moment, you defined exactly what it means to Become Your Dream. Life, inevitably, breaks us down. Each day, in tiny ways, something of us is taken, or breaks, or decays. It is the nature of the human beast. For us to do anything, even before we dream, we must learn how to repair. We must learn how to be emotionally bionic and where we cannot repair ourselves we must seek out others who can do the repair for us. We are all broken in our individual ways, and the delicate skill of self-repair is what, ultimately, will really allow us to become our dream.
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