Dreamers sit in bakeries

“The kids these days, they have to work. The time for dreams, the time for dreaming, is done. But everyone is dreaming, everyone is dreaming these days.”

Sitting in a little bakery two doors down from my hostel in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, I didn’t expect to hear this. I didn’t expect to hear any English, to be honest, but a woman behind me and slightly to the left was ranting in her broken English, nonetheless.

While I don’t know exactly what she was going for in that conversation, she seemed to be painting our younger generation as irresponsible and privileged. To her, the bakery we were sitting in and the shops around it only stayed in business for the past few years because they were working hard.

She seemed tired of younger people going about life without working their fingers to the bone (OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I guess we’ll never know).

And I just sat there, slowly eating my food and listening to her argue with a fellow bakery goer. But I wish I hadn’t because I want her to know that yes, working is important, but dreaming is the basis of it all.

Dreaming is what gets people out the door. It makes working 40 hours a week worth it. It makes people learn a second language, or a third. It makes people teach themselves skills and stay up at night to get something right.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes all people ever do is dream. They create scenarios in their heads and aspire for them, but when the hard work starts, they decide to get a new dream.

Ma’am, what I need you to know is that when I was a girl, I dreamed of helping people. That’s led me to volunteering in a hospital, to becoming a lifeguard, to working for newspapers and now to learning a second language.

The world is not divided between dreamers and doers, because the people that dreamed the most all started out with a dream of how they wanted it to be.