Self-Image, Vision, Dream

1
“I have a dream,” proclaimed Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington event.

The vision or dream is meant to go public; it is meant to be shared, and shared with as many people as possible. Which could explain why, on that historic day in Washington D.C., with tens of thousands assembled to hear him and others speak, King, following his opening remarks, paused and then began his “I have a dream” speech rather than the one that had been written for the occassion.
What do you do with a dream like the one that Martin Luther King had? You articulate it –  as eloquently and passionately as he did, hopefully. You communicate it to as many people as possible.
About the four dead black girls blown up in a church in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil unrest there, one of King’s closest associates, in a recent TV interview, remarked, “The heaviest burden of leadership is the death of your followers.” He also said, “More powerful than the march of armies is an idea whose time has come.”

“We must substitute courage for caution,” King would exhort his followers. He was just one of myriad black preachers  in the South before he became the leader of the civil rights movement. He certainly had his fair share of fear about taking on the role. Prayer helped. Faith.

The Dream Delivered

It took a president – Lyndon Johnson, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – to begin to deliver on King’s dream.
The preacher and the politician; the inspirational black activist, who eloquently embodied the dream in his rhetoric, and the progressive president, with his vision of the Great Society, who signed it into law: an example of what I call the leadership pair.

2
“To serve is to rule” is the motto of Groton, the elite boys’ school which was founded by Reverend Endicott Peabody in 1884. His dream: to produce brilliant, forceful young men of high ideals, dedicated to public service. (Source: “East Side Story”, Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker , Feb. 25, 2008)

To rule is to serve. “I’m 80 years old,” said one ruler, “and all I’ve ever known is service. My concern is not for me,” he said, when asked about his deteriorating health. “It’s never been for me.”

3
They say that we never go beyond the image we have of ourselves. How do you see yourself? What can you see yourself doing? Can you see yourself in some other game? A bigger, more challenging game?

I have always harbored the dream of being a writer, but I have never been able to embrace the image of myself as one. That’s because there was none. None that came to me of its own accord, that is – the only kind that matters, in my experience. I have been writing over the years in an effort to prove to myself that I can. If I can, then I can be what I do. Rather than having a clear vision or image of myself as a writer and letting everything follow – flow – from that.

4
No leaders. Only followers. We are all being led by something – principles, beliefs, expediency, fate. Driven by hormones, circumstances. By fear, greed, ambition. Guided .

What follows is the opening paragraph of an article in The New Yorker that examines the AIDS treatment controversy in South Africa: “Zeblon Gwala, a South African based in Durban, used to work as a long-haul truck driver, but he is in a different business now. A few years ago, Gwala began to dream about herbs. Some nights he would see just one, on others two or three. Gwala’s grandfather, who died when he was a boy, had been a traditional village healer, and in the dreams he would tell Gwala which herbs to collect and where to get them. Gwala kept a list next to his bed, and eventually, when it had grown to eighty-nine, his grandfather instructed him to divide the herbs into two groups and boil each batch. The resulting concoctions, the apparition assured him, would cure AIDS, the disease that was destroying his country. Gwala followed instructions. He quit his job, turned his garage into a factory, and opened a storefront dispensary in downtown Durban, wedged between a dry cleaner and a furniture store. He hung two signs next to the door: One has ‘Doctor Gwala’ written on it, and the other says ‘H.I.V. and AIDS Clinic’.”  (“The Denialists”, Michael Specter, The New Yorker , March 12, 2007)

Talk about being driven by something (I quote from another New Yorker article, this one about a natural gas boom going on in a county in the state of Wyoming): “A place in the throes of an energy boom isn’t all that different from a person in the throes of addiction: there’s the denial that things are out of control; there’s the sleeplessness and the moral carelessness, and the fact that you‘re doing something that you know isn’t good for you but you just can’t stop. ‘They’re going after everything,’ said [a rancher from the area]. ‘The impact on this kind of land, with our slow growing season and thin soils, is essentially irreparable.’ [ … ] In the past six years, requirements for rig spacing have been downsized from eighty acres to as few as ten [each well takes up about three acres of land], which means that parts of the plains are now entirely given over to gas development. The result: a forty-six-per-cent decline in mule-deer populations. ‘I give the government an F-minus for the way they’ve handled this situation,’ [this same rancher continued]. ‘They’ve ripped the roots out of the very thing they say they care about: community values, family values, property rights. The way I look at it, the whole soul of a place has been torn out, and for what? You don’t put a soul back into a place once it’s gone.’” (“Boomtown Blues”, Alexandra Fuller, The New Yorker , February 5, 2007)

5
The challenge – to live as fully in reality as we do in fantasy. But how? Certainly, not by trying to enact our fantasies. Fantasies are for the mind’s eye only, unlike the dream or vision, which comes to us to be made real.

Fantasy,  our escape from the storm or dead calm outside – here we can try out various roles for ourselves; we can imagine ourselves acting heroically or behaving badly, we can have sex with our favorite movie star, achieve victory, exact revenge. The wonderful thing about fantasy is that it is a realm which poses none of the threats and has none of the dreaded consequences of the real world. The problem is we can spend so much time there – in our heads or in virtual worlds – that life, or what we come to think of as life, begins to happen there and nowhere else.

There are many rules in this thing called life, but there is really only one rule when it comes to living your life, and that’s to live your vision or dream. Non of your own? There is always someone else’s. Find someone whose dream or vision you can believe in. Put all of your energy in making it real.

6
A word on leadership style:
For every activity or endeavor that requires leadership, there is an appropriate style of leadership – at least a style or styles more appropriate than others. For every individual in a leadership position, there is a preferred way to lead. Not necessarily the best one.

I’ll end with a quote from another article in The New Yorker , this one about the choreographer Mathew Bourne:
“Once, in a post-performance talk, a dancer in Mathew Bourne’s company described how a particular part of a dance had been invented by a particular dancer, and another part by another dancer. An audience member then asked her what Bourne did. “Oh,” she replied, “he’s a genius. He takes the best bits.” On occasion, Bourne will show a flash of pride, and defend his role as the creator of his productions. But mostly he just sits back and smiles, and says how grateful he is to the company for what they have given him. Tellingly, he will often add how important the performers’ sense of their joint authorship is to the success of the show, how each dancer does his role more spiritedly, more artistically, because he feels it is his creation.” (“Swans’ Way”, Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, March 12, 2007)
Now that’s my kind of leadership. Enlightened, I would say.