Stay Realistic

In the labyrinth of the human psyche, a silent conflict sometimes arises between what is and what we wish were. We drown ourselves in sketching the contours of an illusory future, and we excessively raise our expectations of life and others, only to find ourselves, in the end, captives of disappointments we have crafted with our own hands. Detachment from reality is not merely a fleeting escape, but a misleading psychological defense mechanism. We resort to it to flee the bitterness of the present moment, building castles of illusions upon shifting sands. The higher the expectations rise without the backing of effort and realism, the more painful the fall. This state reminds me of the story of a man who spent his entire life collecting lottery tickets, dreaming of the moment he would become a millionaire. He neglected his work, distanced himself from his relationships, and lived estranged from his present, awaiting a “miracle of tomorrow.” When gray hair overtook him, he realized he had wasted his real life waiting for a life that had not yet begun, finding himself empty-handed from both past and present. As the famous Arabic proverb says: “He who watches others dies of worry, and he who chases mirages dies of thirst.” Drowning in illusions neither feeds the hungry nor builds a future. Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi brilliantly captured this psychological dislocation between hopes and reality when he said: “The attainment of desires is not achieved by wishing; rather, the world is taken by force.” A note on realism: it is not an acceptance of misery or the killing of dreams, but rather the psychological courage to face life as it is, not as we wish it to be. When you lower your expectations and focus on the step before you now, you protect your mind from distraction and empower yourself to transform the simple present into a real, not illusory, future. Stay realistic… for lovers of mirages are never satisfied.