Wednesday, December 12, 2012

You either live your dreams or you don’t


Dreams are an interesting concept.  We all have dreams and aspirations we reach for in life.  They can as simple as taking a cruise to something as large as winning an Academy Award.  But how many of us truly reach for our dreams?  I don’t mean setting goals, stepping stones and crossing items off a checklist to get to an end point.  I mean, truly, madly living that dream despite it not yet coming true.  It’s much easier to think we’re on our way to our dreams instead of accepting we’re already on the road to living them, we just have to move towards them.

I’m tired of being afraid of living my dreams, because I already am.  I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  What do I get to do every day?  I get to write.  It can be a poem, the inklings of a short story or even something I’m being paid for, but I’m still writing.  I’m still creating something from scratch and that’s what I’ve always wanted to do.  So, why am I still afraid I’m not doing it when clearly I am?

Society has a funny way of making us think what we’re doing is wrong.  This has been true since humans were capable of forming social groups, creating norms and enforcing them on the rest of a group.  For so long I thought I was doing the wrong thing, I wasn’t being a productive member of society and I wasn’t contributing to what I wanted to do with my own life.  I was working towards impossible standards that weren’t even my own.  They weren’t even the standards of those around me.  They were the standards of some unseen societal entity we all tend to blame for things going poorly, things falling apart and things not seeming to be true.

I don’t want to live this way anymore.  I get to write every day.  I get to do what I love every day.  It may not be what society thinks is productive, it may not always pay the bills but at the end of the day, I am already living my dreams.  Now, the real question is, where can this dream take me?  Where can I go with it?  What can I do to grow, nurture and encourage it?

That’s where I’m at now.

I don’t want to spend another day pretending I’m not a writer.  I am.  I have plans, projects, ideas and I want to spend time evolving them into something more than just the spark they started out as.  There is no better feeling in life, at least to me, than creating something from nothing.  Not many people can do that or want to do that.  Most people are terrified of putting themselves out there on an original idea.  Not me.  It excites me, it encourages me and it makes me feel more alive than ever.

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