Dreams

Dreams can be a fickle thing.
As anyone who's ever had them, know they are often just that. The courage it takes to pick up from the safety of a cookie cutter life to chase them down and try to capture lightning in a bottle, to chase the sun across the horizon in an everlasting battle to fight the very rotation of the earth in order to make the change required to reach that apex of realizing a dream in is in a word difficult.
Fitzgerald argued that it's not the end result but the journey and the smile and more often than not tears that make the end result more gratifying, even going so far as to suggest that the end result is irrelevant as it relates to the journey. AC/DC put it more bluntly. "It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll."
The power of dreams are what can pull us out of bed everyday but it is also the same double edged sword that will leave us confined to that very same bed for days weighed down by the crushing reality of the difficulty involved in rewriting life's story written into the stars. The first step may be the scariest but it is rarely the hardest. Tolkein speaks of Sam's unbreakable will and strength of spirit, that is the inspiration and that is what fate demands of us. The rub is that the journey is often lonely. Finding another like minded individual to share in the adversity is near impossible. So given the circumstance why would anyone in their right mind ever undertake such a long and lonesome path.
Love. It's what defines us as humans, the need to howl at the moon or stare down the sun, or in my case don a white jacket with my name stitched in Tuscan blue and stand in the kitchen. My kitchen.
The Culinary Institute of America asks it's potential applicants to compose an essay describing the circumstances and people that lead them to pursue their culinary dreams. I covered a fair amount of it in my last post. The main idea being that when the rest of my life had turned to shit I found solice in the quiet of hum of the kitchen as it rests dormant in the afternoon, waiting for the next turn. Because there is always a next turn. There's a cheesy metaphor for life in there but I don't have the inclination to try to explain that to someone who doesn't easily understand it's application. The longer I sit in restaurants the more I can see the imprint of life left in each experience and a skewed, frequently alcohol tinged view of what the real world is like. Reporting live from day 1,521 of the grind. Maybe Fitzgerald was right.
"just a leap of faith across a busy boulevard of broken dreams..." Carbon Leaf