Humans are some weird kind of intricate creatures ever known yet to the known universe by, hmmm, humans. Part of that is large because they have this innate sense of aspiration, love, and desire to be something which, though sometimes honestly, they have no idea what that “something” is.
Sometimes they’re like a confused compass looking for its true north… and they probably are… or are we not?
Now, philosophically, that’s kinda weird. Because, unremarkably, logic and philosophy are not chaotic, they’re rather orderly. And for those of us who study the “history of ideas” and “ideas”, it would raise our eyebrows as counterintuitive but as we know, humans sometimes are, at their core counterintuitive to their intuitions—now that’s counterintuitive, right? Right—they challenge their conventional wisdom, etcetera. So hang in there, for a while.
And “weird” as you probably know is not a word which you normally use to explain “order” or purpose for that matter, and so I’m using it here in a sense of which humans are known and/or are being known to be very volatile, unpredictable, and alien creatures, truly so, even to themselves.
We seem to be, all, BECOMING to ourselves. In other words, we are, to a significant extent, a way for us to know ourselves. Humans are the only way for humans to know themselves… and cosmologists will even go as far as to say we’re the way for the universe to know itself. So…
Dreams, ambitions, aspirations, goals, wishes, hopes—name them—are parts of what make us weirdly beautiful… they fuel us into the unknown futures, and tomorrows we only know more or less by faith or faith-inducing theories.
Without dreams, ambitions, and aspirations we’re mere “animals” on a rotating mot of dust in this seemingly unbearable ocean of cosmic dark, trying to survive but somewhat destined to extinction like the rest of species. Survival of the fittest. If we didn’t have these innate drives; dreams, ambitions, and aspirations, Ethnologist and Evolutionary Biologists, Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins would be right. We’re nothing but just a combination of random neurons bumping into each other…selfish genes trying to survive.
But something inside me beckons that we’re far better than that. Someone recently told me “I’m fearfully and wonderfully made” and it sent shockwaves through my veins. Atheistic neuroscientists will of course deflect that as just being neurons firing because of my long-held beliefs or other things. However, I am skeptical to believe that millions of years of evolution develop that. To me, it’s more of a design cause. It has a touch of genius to it, and of course, evolution is dumb unless there’s a genius behind it.
Why that? Dreams, ambitions, and aspirations are intrinsic to our being. They make us who we are. We would die for them and/or without them. We would sacrifice anything to follow those drives that set us aflame. They’re wired into our deoxyribonucleic acid. Our biology cries into existential crisis and alienation without these divine and infinitely invaluable codes.
However, there’s almost virtually a magic twist to this human core reality when we add relationships to the equation or I should say explore relationships in the equation. Again, “why that?” I ask. Mostly it’s because, as relational creatures, our dreams are highly prone to hit a dead-end if we have no one in our relational circle to believe in us. After all, we know that love believes all things.
We’re fundamentally relational beings. Creatures of committed reality named love. Creatures of One-Way-Love or as the Greeks called Agape. Creatures of what philosophers sometimes refer to as “Disinterested Benevolence.” We’re wired to love and be loved, unconditionally. It’s this almost an insatiable desire that fuel-drives our dreams.
Researches time and again have shown that 99.9% of people who have someone in their lives to believe in them are more likely to achieve their dreams, aspirations, and goals than those who don’t. We’re affected by what people believe about us.
Ty Gibson puts it this way, “What you believe about a person produces the way you behave towards the person. And the way you behave towards a person then, in turn, affects what they believe about themselves; which in turn affects the way they behave towards you, and the way they behave towards you then reinforces what you believe at the beginning all along about them.”
In other words, your belief produces the effect that was not true back when you first believed it. A kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of the sort. What you believe about a person has an actualizing effect on that person. Your beliefs about people have a manifesting power. This’s probably not rocket science. We know that no man is an island. Christians know that in Genesis it [was] not good for man and woman to be alone.
True relationships boost and ultimately make our dreams and aspirations come true. And sometimes we will fight to make our dreams and aspirations come true because of relationships. As Malcolm Gladwell notes in his book Outliers, not even rockstars make it to the top by themselves.
We are nothing left to our singular selves. Love, not electromagnetism, is the force that binds persons together to dream and have aspirations that make them succeed in life.
