To Catch A Dream

Now that I've got huge spaces of time opening up, it's amazing how many books I can plough through in a week even if it's packed with activities. If I have pockets of empty slots in the calendar, they're blocked to spend time reading either at home, or at the friends'.

The friends are just as voracious readers. It's rather companionable to spend 2 hours in silence, absorbed in our respective books. With a singleminded focus, completing 5 novels a week can be quite easily done nowadays.

I could talk about so many books and their content, but it would never be as well written as olduvai's posts. On a random day armed with a pitcher of freshly made iced lemon tea, I picked out Alex Marsh's 'Sex & Bowls & Rock & Roll'- How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens. Well, not that I'm that interested in lawn bowling. But that could be replaced by any other mundane activity. Often, it's about the metaphors.

While it's quite a funny little book, it isn't a happy story, at least not to me. At the end of it, I pity the protagonist. Yes, it's one thing to be defeated by reality, but it's quite another to make an attempt to balance it. I choose to view him as surrendering to his life's demands. This is something I understand, but find it hard to accept. And in that acceptance, we trade some of our individuality for the struggling position to live in this society.

I laughed my head off at this paragraph. Oh so true, don't we know this all too well? We know stereotypes like that, oh for sure.

"That is the thing with people in pubs. You can talk to them for years and years and still know next to nothing about them. Whereas if you find somebody in a pub that is keen to reveal their life story within the space of three pints, then your best bet is to set yourself on fire."

You might not be a rock star, but you could still make music, and remain true to that ideal. And somehow, chase the passion in fleeting doses, because we have to live. As children, we had dreams. How many have we fulfilled? How many have we passed on because we don't have the passion anymore, or we choose to give it up for something else? How do you live with yourself, when at the end of the day, you die with so many regrets and unfulfilled dreams?

"So that is that. // Never go back. Never try to recapture. // I have my bowls, I have my important househusbanding role. Why did I ever think I could make it more? The music boat has passed- I have missed it. It is time to stop pretending. Really time, this time."