"W" brings us to Wish, the act of expressing a desire for something. Often associated with some form of magical action of invocation, like the rhyme above or blowing out birthday cake candles.
I suppose there is nothing intrinsically wrong with wishing. It's been part of man's world since forever. Still, the act in itself can quite futile & destructive in my opinion.
Wishing isn't like making plans for your future. It's not even like making plans without limits. Those plans are dreams & we know it. Wishing is investing some small part of yourself into something that most likely will never come true.
My parents were alcoholics. They were reckless, violent & absolutely the last people who should've ever had children. Yet, there we were. I used to watch other families & wonder why I didn't have one like theirs. I used to hope for things to change or dream that I had a different family. But those were hopes & dreams & even an eight year old knew they weren't going to come true.
My sister on the other hand was a different story. She had hopes & wishes tied up into my mother. She knew if this would just happen or that thing wouldn't happen, we could all live happily ever after. She wished for this, she did her little magical rituals of crossing fingers, saying rhymes & making bargains with some unseen deity. Funny, how none of those things ever worked.
With each failed wish, she grew a little dimmer. She put so much into those wishes, that she never really lived her life as it was. She never made real plans for her life, she just to took the first escape she could & that turned out to be a disastrous marriage. To the best of my knowledge, my mother never got any better. The last time I spoke to her was in my late teens after yet another horrid encounter with her.
Still, my sister's wishes for my mother continued right up until May of 2011. On Mother's Day of that year, the clock ran out on my sister's wishing, our mother passed. I felt weirdly numb about the matter. My sister on the other hand had to deal with the fact, that her mother never really changed & that all those wishes were wasted breathes.
You can hope for something, you can dream for it, you can even start to make plans for it, but don't wish for it. Wishing won't get you anything. I'm not saying I don't make my own wishes, we all do. I just usually realize that's what they are, make believe. Wishes won't change my life. They won't fix my past. They won't cure me of HIV. They'll just take my focus away from the here & now. They'll stop me from making real choices for change in my life.
Not making wishes is hard. We do it without thinking. We just can't keep letting ourselves get invested in them though. Failed wishes are toxic & they take a bit of us with them when they fizzle. Eventually we have very little left of us to do anything with in our lives. Here's to wants, dreams & plans.
Cya
No comments:
Post a Comment