Tag: dreams

Prioritise Dreams

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

There was an article on the BBC today which I found very interesting in how it allowed for different perspectives of how we view society. The article discussed how the hopes and dreams of youths are at odds with the type of jobs that will be available to them. Apparently “five times as many seventeen and eighteen year olds in the UK want to work in art, culture, entertainment and sport as there are jobs available” and that equated to over half of those surveyed only wanting to work in this sector. Seemingly the industry that requires people the most is accommodation and catering, unfortunately for them they require seven times the number of students who expressed an interest, wholesale and retail appears to suffering from similar disinterest. According to this article, the report believes “young people’s career aspirations need to be constructively challenged”. The article then moves on to how certain young people potentially feel they cannot achieve career goals because of their gender, ethnicity or social-economic background.

Now this article can be viewed two ways I would suggest. On the one hand it can be seen that the youth of today need to embrace a little reality, that they won’t always be able to do the jobs they want, must stop being fixated with being either Instagram models or footballers – terrible gender stereotyping I know but humour me – but also not allow the barriers of their own existence to hold them back from a more serious career. On the other hand it appears that the majority of young people want an interesting, creative career in the arts and entertainment world, and not to be working as waiters or hotel cleaners. To completely dismiss the first idea would most likely expose a glaring ignorance about the realities of life for many people, “destined for disappointment” as the article put it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in it. However what the article seems to not take into consideration, and this is understandable given the angle it is written from, is that if the young peoples desires “do not meet the demands of the economy” then perhaps the economy should not be the factor that dictates what work people do, perhaps society has it’s priorities wrong.

I would love to see the numbers of people wanting to be artists and musicians, over Instagram models and footballers, because that could change my perspective slightly. That is though my take on value in the creative arts world and I would be an ignorant man to not see the folly in that. There are many reasons young people will not get the jobs they want in life, but they don’t mention that perhaps these jobs just don’t satisfy people, maybe if people could choose they would not endure jobs that exist for no other reason than for the sake of existing, bring no real benefit to society or the earth, and are nothing more than ways to pay tax and kill time as we wait to die. Surely it needn’t be this way. Money, economics and business are not fundamentally bad things in their own right but misused and corrupted they lead to the real needs of people being either ignored or dismissed as childish dreams. We all dreamt of something when we were young though, why is we can never seem to remember our dreams?

A

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

A funny thing Football is. There’s a part of me that views it as my dirty little secret when I’m trying to pretend I’m some kind of intellectual cultured traveller. This is less of a thing these days but undeniably I barely talked football when I ran around as a little hippy activist back in the day. Seemingly the worlds we move in through life change, or a better word may be evolve, and if we’re making the effort to live life not necessarily to the full, but realistically at atleast seventy to eighty percent then it’s not unreasonable to imagine we move throughout a few worlds within our lifetimes.

I wonder if it’s even possible to fully know the world you’re currently inhabiting. Maybe that’s also a ridiculous statement as its probably quite obvious sometimes, but more that if you’re experiencing life in a way in which you’re not thinking too much about who you are or your image within such a world then there’s a chance you just exist. It could be a case of embracing and being true to the moment or some such thing.

I just re-read that last paragraph and now might be a good time to mention I’m struggling with an horrendous hangover, rambling mindlessly without any kind of point in sight. In regards to my ability to write with a stinker of a hangover though I think I have improved from my last effort about a month ago when it took me about three days to write anything coherent again and even then coherent may be a little generous. That’s one of the things this blog is though, some self indulgent observations of course, but for a large chunk it was and still is about the experiment of writing for a year everyday and what that means in various real situations. This hangover while driving back to Scotland is very much then another real situation in which I attempt to write something you may actually want to read. Saying all that, it’s probably not the most interesting thing I’ll ever write.

I’m on the boat across the Irish Sea at the moment, just watched some film about bird watchers. It was alright but I can see why I’ve never heard of it before. The point being though that they found themselves in Alaska at one point and I remembered how much I want to sail around some crazy remote northern or southern areas. I nearly went on a trip last year to Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America with this crazy eighty old Alaskan. In the end I dropped out because his engine looked a long way from ever working and he talked too much. Antarctica, Alaska, the Arctic…all the best places seem to begin with an A

Born Again

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

When people get into their thirties, like I am well into now, they discover new things and sometimes become mad and obsessed with them. In their twenties it doesn’t happen so much but thirties for sure I’ve seen people go crazy. The born again christians of whatever new hobby or life direction they take to fulfil that empty hole in their life. My lack of the focus and attention span required may just protect me from this. I’m currently reading a book on beekeeping and they’re incredible animals, from the nanny bees keeping the larvae at the perfect temperature, and I mean to one degree celsius, to the queen laying two thousand eggs a day to the language they use communicating about good sources of pollen like little stoners. They’re incredible and I want my own apiary, healthy nutritious raw honey, tasty alcoholic mead and the connection and bond with an actual hive of tens of thousand of bees. Will I become obsessed, well maybe we’ll see. It may just fall at the wayside like my plan to learn how to write code – I downloaded an app about a month ago – and making beer – I bought a brewing set about two months ago.

The problem with desiring doing too much is that we put so much effort into the excitement of the planning and dreaming that the actual doing becomes boring. The effort and hard work required to complete these fantasies doesn’t compare to how we have been imagining it in our excitable dreams. In the end we do nothing. Part of this then involves discipline and this seems to be the thing that has been lacking for me. Of course it suited me in my twenties having no discipline, who needs it when you’re just traveling around and having fun. This continued into my thirties but at thirty-four I think I may have to become a born again disciplinarian, or at least born again about the idea of it. If I ever have kids, poor little fuckers. This writing experiment is just that, an experiment but it is also an attempt at learning discipline and creating the habit required to not even notice the effort required to be disciplined. I have the physical discipline to write daily it appears, or at least do at the moment while my life is in one place and stable, but not always the discipline to write well or with effort. That will come, as much because it’ll be boring for myself to just dribble out inane nonsense. But what I am curious to see is whether this discipline can spread out and infect other parts of my life. The discipline to do yoga every morning, to do a little exercise, to eat well – these three things are starting to become necessary more each day as I start to feel the aches and pains of age. Maybe I’ll even make my beer and god forbid sit down long enough without procrastinating to find time to write an app.

Time is the master. While it may be infinite our moment within it certain isn’t. What has happened now in the past is done, it is over. It may have been great and full of experience but if we do not look forward we just become those grumpy old lonely travellers lost in their missed opportunities and repetitive stories. Today I drive to Cockermouth, the day after I probably come back, and the day after that, well thats anyones guess but I suspect it may be a good one.