“Sometimes, looking in the windows of art-dealers south of Piccadilly, I find myself wondering how it is that a painter has stopped just here. I could no more paint that sunset or that beetling cliff, that moorland with the clump of sheep, than I could draw a recognizable human face; but with that amount of enviable skill what has made the painter stop? Perhaps the answer is that if he had ever possessed the capacity to enlarge his skill he would never have begun on that sunset, that cliff, that moorland.”
Graham Greene, Collected Essays, “Edgar Wallace”
It has often seemed to me that people are satisfied with too little, that they settle for the attainment of their nearest dream and do not think they can attain, or think that it is too hard to attain, the next dream in their dreamland hierarchy. Or, worse yet from my point of view, they haven’t any other dreams.
I can easily understand getting tired. Attaining any dream of any size or consequence is hard work, both mentally and physically. But while I can understand taking a rest between bouts of dream chasing, I cannot understand a total abandonment of the effort. To abandon dreams is to settle for less than what you are due, to compromise on what you are capable of becoming. Upon attainment of a certain age, we all become exempt from making yet another attempt, but the best of us keep on even then, even when the likelihood of attaining the next dream is surely dismal at best.
Chasing dreams is the essence of what sets humanity apart from other species. For the most part, other species accept the hand they are dealt and seek only to occupy the niche in the hierarchy of survival to which they were assigned by birth.  A desire for something more, a certain striving, is what drove the first organism in the chain that evolved into humanity from the sea, and learning to strive is the first step in learning to dream.  Desire is the energy that spurs the development of intelligence, and it is intelligence which fuels dreams. To quit dreaming at any stage of life is to settle for what you have at the cost of losing the spark of your humanity.
In making this argument, I don’t question the existence of animal intelligence. Most animals with whom I’ve had interaction have intelligence and emotions, and are quite capable of resolving the problems which accompany their niche in life. To say this is to say nothing more than the obvious; no species would survive for long if the truth were otherwise.
But human intelligence is of another order. At each moment in the chain of human existence, we have not only been aware there was something far greater than we presently understood, but we were endowed with the tools and, most importantly, the imagination to attempt to discover something more about its shape, size, and workings.  And in order to be a significant player in this continual human voyage of discovery, we not only must dream in order to separate ourselves from the beasts of the field, we must dream as big a dream as we can in order to achieve any success whatsoever during the moment in which we dream.
For it is not only the leading scientists, philosophers, or theoreticians that take us on our voyage of discovery. While they may be our leaders, they cannot do everything by themselves. They are as dependent as anyone else upon the basic services and goods necessary for human survival in any age – the services and goods the rest of the crew supplies. For humanity’s ship to sail to the farthest possible horizon, everyone aboard must improve the skills necessary for the position they hold or for the position to which they aspire.
To think we are not all onboard the same ship is to deny the truth of the most recent photograph of the earth taken from deep space, the first such picture to be taken since 1972. Of course there are deniers; there are always deniers, there are always those members of our own species who are incapable of dreaming or too afraid to try.  We cannot leave them behind any more than we can leave behind the other species, for they share the same fragile vessel with us – but we must remember that they have no place in the structure of command.
I accept the fact that some are endowed with differing abilities at birth and that not everyone is capable of dreaming as big as someone else. But saying that we all should chase yet one more dream than the last one we caught does nothing to belittle any single one of us. If your dream is bigger than mine, so be it; that fact says nothing about our need for the chase, only about its direction and purpose. To be human is to take part in what is, after all, a steeplechase rather than a race to a distant goal line, and if only the politicians of every age could understand this basic difference, think of how many more horizons we might conquer.
Perhaps I suffer from having been raised in a remote valley, one isolated in so many ways that no member of the millennial generation could possibly understand how alone I felt. The fact of its utter isolation meant that when I became old enough to peek over the valley’s rim, I discovered there were even more and bigger horizons yet to be conquered – not digital game horizons, but real, intimidating, physical horizons that could just as easily become a barrier as something capable of being conquered. These farther horizons were alluring; these farther horizons taught me to pull myself up by my own bootstraps and get going, just as the immense overarching sky under which I was raised was filled with the panoply of opportunities necessary to teach me that big dreams are far better than small ones and much easier to dream.
But that was just my own particular motivation. It is not offered as the only way forward; it is offered in recognition that motivation can be found equally well in the harsher lessons of life as in silver spoons. It is offered in recognition of the fact that we each must find our own motivation to seek the farthest horizon, to dream the biggest dream of which we are capable.
