“While many people think of reality as the enemy of dreaming, in fact, hard-headed reality must ground dreaming.” (p. 53)
I‘ve long struggled with the tendency of dreamers to begin their process with tidy utopian ideals disconnected from the complex and messy realities of human frailty and inevitable systemic dysfunctions.
The approach, (while the bread and butter of political campaigns,) is naive. Noble maybe some of the time… naive all of the time.
The implementation of utopian ideals cannot help but be as messy and broken as the people and systems that embody them.
While other thinkers have observed the importance of beginning the dream with a frank assessment of one’s presenting realities (e.g. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline), core to the Christian worldview is the possibility that such honesty need never be the end of the story. Problems are never a death sentence, fate, or doom. They are simply facts.
As mere facts, they can be brought out into the light and examined. Turned over and over and looked at from a variety of angles. Underlying causes can be explored. Complicating circumstances, personalities, and effects can be examined.
No matter how disastrous, disappointing or desperate the results of our (more…)