Know your Dreams by Asif Sultan Matta.

Know your Dreams

Asif Sultan Matta

Dreams give you a reason to live, facts don’t.  In order to know one’s dreams one must know ones purpose of life. There are two purposes of one’s life. It is actually only one, but to make it simple I have classified it into two. One is to serve our creator, which Quran talks about is, Wa ma khalak tul jinna wal insa illaa li’yae’budoon” “We have not created men and Jinn except to worship”. We’ve been created by God so that we may do what he wants us to do; to obey his guidance in our personal and public affairs. The second purpose, which is actually the further manifestation of the former one, is to serve the creation, which Iqbal beautifully explains in the following words,

Dard e dil k wastay paida kiya insaan ko

Warna taa’at ke liye kuch kam na the Karo’biyan.

Man cannot live independently. He needs others' help. There are many dimensions of life, which man falls short to get mastery over. Every one cannot be a doctor to treat himself; everybody cannot be a teacher to teach his wards; it is not everybody’s cup of tea to be a pilot to make himself fly to other country; so everybody serves a purpose by fulfilling different works. But one must do the work which he is interested in; he gets excitement from, to make his life placid and attain inner peace. Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, says, “Do the job you love, you don’t have to work a day in your life”, that means the work which you’d be doing out of love and interest, would not be reckoned as work at all, but a source of your excitement and happiness.   

Now the question arises that how a person has to set his role in this area; or we call it in another terms that how a person should determine his goals of life to achieve, which dreams he should fix to follow purposefully.

 Regrettably, in today’s world everybody is in race. No one is concerned about one’s own interests and likings, rather they’re unaware of them. Everybody wants to become a doctor, an engineer and things like such without knowing the inner yearning- which a novelist, Paulo Coelho terms as Inner Call in his masterpiece The Alchemist- We should know what our inner call is, meaning what are we inherited with, what God wants us to be to serve the mankind

The problem in our education system is race; hankering after alike goals.  Everyone is in a same race, want to beat others. And more’s the pity that evaluation is done by a same yardstick, every student is painted with the same brush; special qualities are ignored. Students are not let think freely and independently so that they can know themselves; they can know their strengths and weaknesses. Teacher is supposed to help the student to discover  himself but unfortunately he’s not let to even think about his own friend- whenever he is supposed to write about his own friend, he has to copy it from English guide books. He sees his friend through the prism of author of guide book or sometimes teacher’s. Parents force their wards to opt the stream which they are not interested in. They place their onus of dreams, which they couldn’t achieve in their lives, into the feeble shoulders of their wards, which breads frustration in youth. We ignore the fact that everyone is blessed with different and special abilities. When God has created us different, then why we want to be like others, why do we want to go after identical goals without knowing our interests and likings?

In order to set our real dreams, we must know ourselves. We must discover ourselves. We must listen to that inner call, which according to Paulo Coelho is the call of our dreams and goals of your life. We should introspect what we really are ought to do in our lives; what we love to do; what we get pleasure from doing? These are things which we should ask to ourselves, then dreams set by this persevering exercise of self-realization would be strong and invulnerable. And there will be intense passion, patience, faith and what not, while following such strong dreams. God too will surely help in its achievement because he is the one who has inherited such interests in you. Then your life becomes worth living, because you are doing what you have been created for; your dreams become worth dying for, nonetheless you attain them but you are living a meaningful life by following them.

Nick Vijicic, a man without arms and legs, one of the best motivational speakers, says, “If you haven’t found something worth dying for, you haven’t found something worth living for”.

May God make you know your real dreams and make them come true.