Drafting Dreams

How does one endeavor to build someone's happiness and draft the blueprint of an early history of someone's dreams? We are never really too conscious of this question as we fulfill our day-to-day obligations as parents - feeding, clothing, reading, introducing the world and being at best efforts to hand off values and a sense of responsibility. We were never the type of parents who think that they will be grooming a genius who will end the evils of greed and capitalism, but we try in our own humble, neutral way, to show him how we went about this fascinating and often perplexing planet that somehow afforded us some joys. 

Our answer to the question is to reciprocate the happiness that has been passed on to us, then let him learn to build it on his own and make it real by sharing it with others and spreading kindness. Now, that's not bad coming from a rather preachy, slightly eccentric father who makes an effort to keep his own table and eat alone during lunch at the office. 

Our answer to the question is to make you thirst for knowing, and discovering joy as you immerse into the process of knowing through books, through your interactions with people, through travelling, through the internet (your favorite). And while you are only four, we also respected your interests and inclinations - which is probably shaped from our own. One of the few things your father believed in Plato was that Intelligence results to Goodness. I simplify it, or maybe made it less generalized, in saying that wisdom persuades us to be kind. 

So to celebrate your fourth 360-degree spin around the earth, we didn't take you to Greece to learn about the ancients, or to Sudan to experience hunger first-hand, nor did we buy you a new Mac, or a new book. Heavily weighing upon your own interests as a four year old, and our middle-class inclinations, we took you to Hong Kong Disneyland. 

So it was now all part of the building of your happiness, drafted upon the blueprint of the early history of your dreams. This is the beginning of your learning about the fascination and consternation that you will gather in life as your travel. You sat on my shoulders while we watched the fireworks blasting in tune with themes from Disney movies. We saw your favorite Philharmagic twice, our perceptions of reality made positively phantasmal by 3D, by evocative scents, by water squirted to us while in the theater. You were wearing your Woody costume in the flights of fancy parade, and Woody stopped by to hug you. We had breakfast with Chef Mickey. 

It was all as if the draft of your dreams was a fulfillment of one of our own.