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When I think about dreams,
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like many of you,
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I think about this picture.
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I was eight when I watched Neil Armstrong
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step off the Lunar Module onto the surface of the Moon.
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I had never seen anything like it before,
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and I've never seen anything like it since.
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We got to the Moon for one simple reason:
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John Kennedy committed us to a deadline.
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And in the absence of that deadline,
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we would still be dreaming about it.
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Leonard Bernstein said two things are necessary for great achievement:
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a plan and not quite enough time.
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(Laughter)
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Deadlines and commitments
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are the great and fading lessons of Apollo.
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And they are what give the word "moonshot" its meaning.
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And our world is in desperate need of political leaders
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willing to set bold deadlines
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for the achievement of daring dreams on the scale of Apollo again.
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When I think about dreams,
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I think about the drag queens of LA and Stonewall
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and millions of other people risking everything
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to come out when that was really dangerous,
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and of this picture of the White House lit up in rainbow colors,
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yes --
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(Applause) --
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celebrating America's gay and lesbian citizens' right to marry.
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It is a picture that in my wildest dreams I could never have imagined
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when I was 18
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and figuring out that I was gay
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and feeling estranged from my country
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and my dreams because of it.
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I think about this picture of my family
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that I never dreamed I could ever have --
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(Applause) --
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and of our children holding this headline
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I never dreamed could ever be printed about the Supreme Court ruling.
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We need more of the courage of drag queens and astronauts.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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But I want to talk about the need for us to dream
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in more than one dimension,
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because there was something about Apollo that I didn't know when I was 8,
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and something about organizing that the rainbow colors over.
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Of the 30 astronauts in the original Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs,
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only seven marriages survived.
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Those iconic images of the astronauts bouncing on the Moon
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obscure the alcoholism and depression on Earth.
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Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk,
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asked during the time of Apollo,
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"What can we gain by sailing to the moon
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if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?"
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And what can we gain by the right to marry
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if we are not able to cross the acrimony
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and emotional distance that so often separates us from our love?
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And not just in marriage.
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I have seen the most hurtful, destructive,
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tragic infighting in LGBT and AIDS
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and breast cancer and non-profit activism,
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all in the name of love.
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Thomas Merton also wrote about wars among saints
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and that quoted, "there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence
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to which the idealist most easily succumbs:
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activism and overwork."
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The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace.
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It destroys our own inner capacity for peace."
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Too often our dreams become these compartmentalized fixations
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on some future
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that destroy our ability to be present for our lives right now.
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Our dreams of a better life for some future humanity
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or some other humanity in another country
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alienate us from the beautiful human beings sitting next to us
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at this very moment.
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Well, that's just the price of progress, we say.
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You can go to the Moon
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or you can have stability in your family life.
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And we can't conceive of dreaming in both dimensions at the same time.
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And we don't set the bar much higher than stability
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when it comes to our emotional life.
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Which is why our technology for talking to one another
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has gone vertical,
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our ability to listen and understand one another
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has gone nowhere.
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Our access to information is through the roof,
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our access to joy, grounded.
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But this idea, that our present and our future are mutually exclusive,
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that to fulfill our potential for doing we have to surrender
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our profound potential for being,
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that the number of transistors on a circuit can be doubled and doubled,
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but our capacity for compassion and humanity and serenity and love
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is somehow limited
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is a false and suffocating choice.
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Now, I'm not suggesting
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simply the uninspiring idea of more work-life balance.
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What good is it for me to spend more time with my kids at home
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if my mind is always somewhere else while I'm doing it?
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I'm not even talking about mindfulness.
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Mindfulness is all of a sudden becoming a tool for improving productivity.
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(Laughter)
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Right?
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I'm talking about dreaming
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as boldly in the dimension of our being
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as we do about industry and technology.
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I'm talking about an audacious authenticity
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that allows us to cry with one another,
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a heroic humility that allows us to remove our masks and be real.
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It is our inability to be with one another,
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our fear of crying with one another, that gives rise to so many
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of the problems we are frantically trying to solve in the first place,
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from Congressional gridlock to economic inhumanity.
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(Applause)
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I'm talking about what Jonas Salk called an Epoch B,
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a new epoch in which we become as excited about and curious about
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and scientific about the development of our humanity
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as we are about the development of our technology.
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We should not shrink from this opportunity
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simply because we don't really understand it.
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There was a time when we didn't understand space.
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Or because we're more used to technology and activism.
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That is the very definition of being stuck in a comfort zone.
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We are now very comfortable imagining unimaginable technological achievement.
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In 2016, it is the dimension of our being itself
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that cries out for its fair share of our imagination.
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Now, we're all here to dream,
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but maybe if we're honest about it,
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each of us chasing our own dream.
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You know, looking at the name tags to see who can help me with my dream,
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sometimes looking right through one another's humanity.
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I can't be bothered with you right now. I have an idea for saving the world.
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Right?
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(Laughter)
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Years ago, once upon a time, I had this beautiful company
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that created these long journeys for heroic civic engagement.
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And we had this mantra:
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"Human. Kind. Be Both."
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And we encouraged people to experiment outrageously with kindness.
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Like, "Go help everybody set up their tents."
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And there were a lot of tents.
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(Laughter)
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"Go buy everybody Popsicles."
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"Go help people fix their flat tires
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even though you know the dinner line is going to get longer."
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And people really took us up on this,
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so much so that if you got a flat tire on the AIDS ride,
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you had trouble fixing it, because there were so many people there asking you
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if you needed help.
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For a few days, for tens of thousands of people,
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we created these worlds
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that everybody said were the way they wish the world could always be.
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What if we experimented with creating that kind of world
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these next few days?
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And instead of going up to someone and asking them, "What do you do?"
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ask them, "So what are your dreams?"
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or "What are your broken dreams?"
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You know, "TED." Tend to Each other's Dreams.
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(Applause)
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Maybe it's "I want to stay sober"
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or "I want to build a tree house with my kid."
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You know, instead of going up to the person everybody wants to meet,
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go up to the person who is all alone
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and ask them if they want to grab a cup of coffee.
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I think what we fear most
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is that we will be denied the opportunity to fulfill our true potential,
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that we are born to dream
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and we might die without ever having the chance.
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Imagine living in a world
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where we simply recognize that deep, existential fear in one another
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and love one another boldly because we know
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that to be human is to live with that fear.
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It's time for us to dream in multiple dimensions simultaneously,
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and somewhere that transcends all of the wondrous things
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we can and will and must do
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lies the domain of all the unbelievable things we could be.
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It's time we set foot into that dimension
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and came out about the fact that we have dreams there, too.
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If the Moon could dream,
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I think that would be its dream for us.
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It's an honor to be with you.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
