Is your life living you?

I read recently that when people are in the final days and weeks of their life one of their biggest regrets is that they lived their life according to other people’s expectations. They had big things they wanted to do but never got around to any of it because they were too busy keeping up with the whole marraige – baby – house – vacation – retirement – gardening timeline that society presses onto us all.

Cinderella taught us that “a dream is a wish your heart makes” and while this is very sweet she unfortunately reflects the way our culture views dreaming. We’ve come to believe that dreams are the stuff of fairy tales. They’re not practical and they’re not realistic – a t least not for any one over the age of 6.

When we’re kids it’s fine to dream – it’s encouraged. But not for very long. When I was 6 I told my parents that I wanted to be a writer. With the best of intentions they told me that though that was a very nice idea it wasn’t realistic because writers don’t make any money. This annoyed me because I knew it wasn’t true. I knew my favourite writer, Roald Dahl, wasn’t secretly working at the 7-11 to make ends meet and so I knew it didn’t have to be true for me. But I was one of the lucky ones – I was stubborn. Many kids would have given up right then and there.

Did you know that if you ask a class of kindergarteners how many of them are artists, almost every one of them will raise their hand? It’s wonderful! But then if you ask the same question to a class of sixth graders, only a few hands go up – and they go up sheepishly. Already at the tender age of 12, we believe that it is unpractical – embarrassing – to be passionate about something creative.

And this of course gets worse and worse the older we get. Our culture does not embrace dreamers. We are looked at as flighty and irresponsible – not as anyone who could make a difference in the world or – heaven forbid – be successful!

Many people claim that they do not have a dream. They say they don’t know what they want to do with their lives and to that I say “bullshit!” We always know what we want to do. Our dreams are always speaking to us but we tend to talk so loudly over the top of them that often we cannot hear them.

Our dreams are the things we say we’d do if we weren’t married, or didn’t have kids, or didn’t have a mortgage, or weren’t so busy, or … They are the things we make excuses for not doing. They are the things we have always thought we’d be good at and the things we’ve always had a geeky interest in. And we don’t have just one dream in our life, we have many. We have some that stay with us a short while and others that stay with us for years – it’s those ones that stay with us for years (and then decades) that we’d be foolish to ignore.

We all have dreams but unfortunately we also all have excuses.

Tagged as: anthony robbins, beleive, carly wilson, chase, cheryl richardson, cinderella, cliche, creative, dream, dreamer, dreaming, dreams, excuses, fairy tales, follow, jon acuff, just do it, motivation, pursue, quitter, roald dahl, tony robbins