Last night after dinner and the children off to do whatever the hell they were doing, we plus some friends spent a beautiful autumn evening in the Jacuzzi chatting and looking at the stars. As is always the case the discussion took a turn to the more serious things like life, the Universe and such trivia.
I suppose it is axiomatic that at some stage the discussion will drift into , what is and what could have been. The topics ranged from " life is a crapshoot", most wonderful things out there we had ...experienced to the inevitable " what has happened to all the dreams we had".
When we left the pool I thought about some of the lines in the song from Les Miserables, " I dreamed a dream.
"Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted.
I had a dream my life would be
So different from the dreams I'm living
Now life has killed the dreams I dreamed."
I also went back to Nelson DeMille:
"The young have aspirations that never come to pass
The old have reminiscences of things that never happened."
It made me sad to think maybe so many things that I remember and tell people might be just that, things that never happened, or that somewhere along the road to where I am now, I just let go some of the dreams I had.
And yet looking at the world and specifically South Africa from my perspective, I am also sad that many of the next generation will find life more difficult than we experienced between the forties and early nineties and as a result, will have to scale down or even abandon some or most of their dreams.