There was a man, a sensible man, and he set out to built a comfortable and sensible house of stone, and he built it high on the cliffs, with proper foundations, and he lived there, quite happily. There was another man, perhaps somewhat less rooted, with a vision in his head of beauty. He built a outstanding house, incredibly beautiful, with silken walls, rare woods, and panels inlaid with gemstones. And because it was beautiful, he built it on the beach, where the sound of the waves would calm him to sleep, and the songs of the seagulls would sooth him.
When the first storm came along, the sensible man slept safe. The wind and the waves didn’t phase him, and indeed, he didn’t notice that night being any worse than the others that had gone before. But the second man’s house was uprooted, torn apart by the weather, and sank thereafter into the sand of the beach. When morning came, he was sat on the links, looking down at a terrible sight, as all his hopes and dreams lay strewn across the strand.
Therein lies the rub. The people who do the practical things succeed. The people who dream rarely do. And never the twain shall meet. I find my best and closest friends, unlike myself, are steady, practical people, who can make things happen without a show, without any drama. They are often as unlike me as it is possible to be. I am often a dreamer. All too often, my dreams are relatively impractical.
To make them work, I’ve learned from my practical friends. I’ve learned the importance of the sensible and boring parts. I keep my lists to hand, I do the groundwork and the research necessary. I do the leg work. Because if I don’t put in the foundations, the whole project is doomed to fail. By applying my focus to the practicalities, I can then apply my focus to the showy, the flash.
I’d like to think that this process is somewhat symbiotic. That some of my more practical friends felt that they didn’t just need to rely on the practical and the sensible, and felt that they could chase their dreams. That as I was learning to ground my fantasies, they were getting normality off the ground.
Terry Pratchett once said that humanity is “where the rising ape meets the falling angel”. In that, I can see the same paradigm. The rootedness of the caveman, come down from the trees, and the soaring angelic majesty, meeting in one individual. I often denigrate the spark of showmanship that dominates my personality as being impractical and unfeasible. I frame things as impossible so as to make them more palatable to my own self.
Because what I crave, deep down, is not the soaring dream palaces of the mind, but the solid practicalities of the world. A sensible person, who can drag me back down to earth when I need it, and remind me that I don’t need to sell the stars. After all, they’ll always be there, whether I sell them or not…