Goals are meant to be approached pragmatically. Logical, well calculated, articulated outcomes that are attainable if executed well to pass. They are grade school math, one plus one makes two. Cause and effect, if you keep moving one foot in front of the other you will be somewhere different then where you started. I have a hard time feeling connected to the need of setting goals sometimes, it doesn't have the whimsy I desire but there is something comforting in knowing what you can have a say in the matters of the direction in your life and that change is the only constant. As simple as, if you keep doing “something” something will happen. But of course life isn’t always as reliable, life is the scientific method. You can have a clear way to see questions and predict the outcome with all the right common sense and the result may be completely different, for a many number of reasons. Anything from a grand new discovery being made to the wind blowing differently, the outcome to your experiment may leave you puzzled. And like life you still have to try your best, putting the jigsaw puzzle together without the box to show you the final picture. To achieve goals this is the way to do it. If you want to be a doctor you must study hard and go to school, if you want to be strong you have to eat well and stick to a training regimen. You can plan it. These are the things that have a more set course of action to compilation set up. Being realistic and rational will get you a goal.
Dreams do not follow control or rationale. You’re putting your trust into something you’ve never seen before. Something only you believe in and you believe so strongly needs to exist but doesn't already exist. It requires an unreasonable relationship with risk. You have to bet on yourself and on yourself alone. It has to be a leap of faith. By definition that is what it means to be a dreamer. And in the process what you see may be different, it may even tell you you will fail and you have to decide that there is an alternate reality where that is impossible. It’s similar to when you hear the success stories of creatives and they say that they didn’t know how they would get there but were certain it would happen. Sometimes chances can seem like they were made out of thin air just for you because they’re something completely new that maybe you couldn’t have ever fathomed either.
When I was younger I found a musician that was finding a lot of success doing something that had never really been seen before. In an interview she was asked about her rising star and she said it was all a surprise to her as well, that she was essentially doing something she and many people thought there wasn’t an audience for. She mentioned how she was always just working towards making what she wanted to make but she didn’t even know where it would take her, that she was especially working towards a job she and no one in the world knew could exist until it did. Dreams aren’t set in any form of reality because they haven’t been made real yet. And yet you have to run towards them with full undoubting conviction.
Essentially we can work hard with passion towards a goal and even after doing everything right the next step will be proceeding at full risk, heck you may even have to be delusional.
When we’re asked what our goals are we tend to answer in a list type fashion and when we’re asked what our dreams are we may get shy or our eyes wander out because we know we’re seeing something that is just over the rainbow.
This show has been that for me, never would I have ever been able to conjure up the idea of getting a chance to truly give my childhood dreams a shot, something I wouldn’t even mention to the people closest to me, through a show designed to give opportunities to a school I would research and long over on a hidden tab on my high school computer lab monitor.
A chance at a goal or a dream may come when you least expect it, they are gifts and we must nurture them with the same amount of passion we set into them, daydreams can be so much closer when we believe they can be.
Ali Esmeralda Marin
Broadway Bound Live Season 2