Source credit: image from “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” written by Charlie Mackesy
Roeland de Graaff contributed a personal story to paper in response to the text and image, for which thanks. From now on, we will periodically invite an inspirational person to write a similar personal piece to an inspirational quote/image.
Original text: “Most of the old moles I know wish they had listened less to their fears and more to their dreams.”
Roeland wrote the following about this:
The mole tells the boy that old moles wish they had listened less to their fears and more to their dreams. For me, this is about the words “less” and “more. The old moles know it’s not about one or the other. Fear cannot do without dream and dream cannot do without fear. A dream without fear has no charge and increases the risk of lumps. Fears without (knowledge of your) dreams stagnate the movement of life. This understanding requires experience and not the other way around. Realizing that your decisions at key moments in your life have been motivated primarily by fear and too little by that which you deeply desire is something we must experience ourselves – the self – in order to learn from it. If you were afraid at desire, what did that fear tell you, what meaning did it have at the time? How did fear help you and does it still have that meaning today or is it in need of revision? The mole wants to teach the boy that dreams are allowed to be there as well as fears, that they are both allowed to be there and are both worth investigating, worth listening to in a fruitful life. Through our dreams and our fears, we can become who we really are.
