Fairytales get a bad rap, especially from adults. In truth, it’s probably adults who should be paying attention to them. Aside from them being an escape from reality and potentially comical, fairytales tend to have the messages that we try to teach our kids but seem to have forgotten ourselves. You’re probably thinking that I’m going to start talking about morals. Yes, they are important too. But I think we adults have forgotten something just as important: passions.
It seemed to be a lot easier when I was kid to imagine myself buying a farm and taking in all the cats and dogs that didn’t have a home or getting up on a stage and singing my heart out in front of a massive crowd of screaming fans. As we get older our “reality” kicks in and tells us those things are simply pipe dreams. We start to make our dreams smaller, more “realistic” and even then we run the risk of still not shrinking them enough.
We go to college to pursue our passions or at the very least our interests, only to graduate and find a job that may or may not be directly related to our degree. If we’re lucky, it kind of-sort of resembles the dream. Most times, we end up behind a desk somewhere with a secure 401K, a great benefits package and a knot in our stomachs on Sunday nights. Truthfully, that is some people’s dream and it’s not a bad one to have. But if you find yourself waking up every morning thinking about that one thing you should have done but never even made the attempt to try, maybe it’s time to take some advice from a fairytale or two. And I don’t mean randomly belting out a song to show you’re really inspired and serious about taking the next step. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. If it floats your boat, I won’t judge.
I was watching a Disney movie with my daughter the other day and it became very apparent to me that we still encourage our kids to believe in the impossible, as we should. But then it dawned on me, too, that at some point in our lives, that narrative changes. When I was little, I was asked, like most kids were, what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was cute when I said an actress or a singer or even that time when I wanted to be a veterinarian. But as I got older, it wasn’t so cute to have those dreams; it was time to start thinking seriously about my future and the question went from, what do you want to be, to, how are you going to make a living?
Reality does have to play a part in all of this, and I do think it’s important to teach our kids both to dream and to work hard to make those dreams come true. But if we can’t lead by example, then what are we really teaching them? I’m not going to say that one day I watched a Disney film, woke up the next morning, quit my job and went back to school. But I will say I took a leap of faith because I realized I was saying things to my kids that I wasn’t myself listening to, and now I’m sitting here getting paid to write, a dream the 13-year-old me thought was impossible.
It seems logical for us adults to get wrapped up into our stresses and our responsibilities, and honestly, that’s sometimes OK. But remember, if someday you find yourself getting wrapped up in a fairytale and it reminds you of a passion that’s been asleep for a while, embrace it. You never know what impossible things could happen.
