My partner came home feeling a bit blue after spending the day downsizing his storage unit. He confided in me that he had gotten rid of so much stuff, things he’d been holding on to for decades; memories, creations, paintings, and ideas, the stuff his dreams were made of.
It hit him while going through box after box, that all of the contents had long ago died, and he had reluctantly buried them deep within a Public Storage unit. It was a big deal for him. He had to grapple with the reality that some of what he had created hadn’t reached its full potential, or at least, his expectations. They had lived their lives. They had expired. And for that, he was feeling forlorn.
As I sat and listened to him reminisce about these things that never quite panned out (things like movies, screenplays, ideas for short stories, plans for trips he never did take) it dawned on me how we set our sights on these dreams in our younger years, and now, if we get to a certain age and those things have not yet manifested, we can feel that our dreams, or our life, has passed us by.
But instead of sitting around being woeful about what was or what could’ve been, we need to be reinventing ourselves, dreaming new dreams, setting new goals. Goals that don’t involve so much pressure, deadlines, and feelings of failure if they’re not met.
Most of the goals we set when we are younger involve money, either making it, or spending it. What if now, more of our goals just revolved around enjoying life, having fun, taking chances, and who knows, possibly succeeding at our original goals without even trying in the meantime?
So you didn’t make it as a Hollywood star? Go ahead and audition for Community Theater. Make friends, have fun, show them your stuff.
You didn’t make it as a best-selling author? Write anyway! Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie didn’t publish her first book until she was 65 years old. You can always self-publish, whether it is a book, your journal, your own blog. Write your own memoir for family to enjoy. There are no limitations.
It might be as simple as setting a new goal to read x-number of books per year, to make one new recipe out of Bon Appetit each month, to plan a family reunion, to learn a foreign language, to finally attempt to paint, attend Saturday morning Tai Chi classes, help clean the beach or neighborhood streets every Sunday evening. Find a cause or an interest that causes you to react, and then act.
We all need something to look forward to, something to dream about, something to achieve. And, it doesn’t always have to do with fame, fortune, or any involvement of the ego. Once we remove the monetary component from the equation, dreams can become exactly that, dreamy.
Having a dream or setting a goal can fill us with excitement, with passion, and the thrill of the unknown. It’s okay, and actually healthy to rethink our dreams and to change course. Because knowing that anything can happen in the future is what makes life interesting. So, when one dream fades, dream a new one. The nice thing about a dream is that sometimes it isn’t the ending that’s the best part any way, it’s the dream itself.