the impossible dream

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams--this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all--to see life as it is and not as it should be." ~Man of La Mancha

from childhood, i remember the story of an errant knight, so frustrated with the world gone wrong that, losing touch with reality, he sets out to seek beauty and bring right to all. he sees windmills as giants, bowls as helmets, a poor man as his squire and friend, and even a prostitute as a lady. chasing his ideals brings him joy yet the world is not content that he should run after lofty castles in the sky, and they "cure" him, turning him back to seeing life as it is. but in the end, we see that his expectations--his looking beyond what everyone took for granted--has actually worked, causing the prostitute to change, to become the lady he believed her to be.
how often have i looked past the gutter in which we all live, believing we can touch the stars. when i taught, i was censored for "expecting too much" out of the teenagers, believing they could do something more than everyone assumed. someone told me the other day not to insist on behavior from a child because, after all, they were just a child. and experience, the bitter taskmaster has taken his shields of mirrors and shown me that, perhaps, my ideals are but illusions of insanity. i have lost friends, seen clearly my own failures, an witnessed the deaths of hopes and dreams as the mirrors mock me.
is it simply that i expect too much--both from myself and others, life in general? or in this dark night am i fighting a battle against an attempt to thwart my following of the quest?
as the knight, now merely a dying man, lies in bed at the end of the movie, his squire and his lady remind him of the ideals, the dreams he once dreamt, and more essentially, the success those dreams had. each time i watch it i lean slightly forward, hoping he will remember, wanting him to believe even though i know it's not true. why? because the only thing worth dying for is change--bringing life into the way it should be, the way that was lost so long ago in a garden.

"We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!" ~from I Cor 13, the Msg