“Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.” With those words, James Dean proved himself to be a very wise man.
As a child I remember having very big dreams. I wanted it all, and then some. I wanted infinite riches, the best cars, airplanes, and boats that could be bought. I wanted a mansion on every continent. I wanted to see everything there was to see and to do everything there was to do. I wanted to go into space, to see the bottom of the ocean, to climb mountains and cross deserts. If it could be imagined, I had imagined it. I wanted, wanted, wanted… Although I never had a plan, I sure had the dreaming part down.
Many people I know get stuck in dreaming mode, like I was so many years ago. It’s easy to dream, to desire, to want. It’s easy to look at what you don’t have or what you don’t have enough of and to desire more. And it’s fun! The imagination is a powerful place.
And then I grew up. I started working, started taking responsibility for my finances and my time. And suddenly, it wasn’t so easy to dream. Suddenly, it was really pretty difficult just to cover the basics and have a little left for fun. While I did take up some hobbies and activities (skydiving and scuba-diving, for instance), I found that most of my time was spent building wealth for others. The dreams started to die. I was making a living, but I wasn’t living.
Truly living is about following your dreams. Sometimes they work out exactly as you planned, other times they come out vastly different from anything you could have prepared yourself for, but always they feed your inner spirit. Living your dream is fulfillment of the soul.
Living and dreaming go hand-in-hand. A dream by itself is perpetually unfulfilled. A dreamless life is perpetually unfulfilling.
Somewhere along the way I remembered again, both how to dream and how to live my dreams. Now I regularly pick a ‘next thing’ and then prepare for it and do it (or sometimes I skip the preparation and just do it, regardless of the result). And you know what? Life is fantastic as a result!
What do you dream about? Are your dreams material? Spiritual? Emotional? Do they revolve around a common theme, like travel or knowledge? Or have you forgotten to dream for a while? Are your dreaming gears rusting from lack of use?
Take the time regularly to dream. Remind yourself daily to feed the imagination and to let your mind wander, and see where it takes you.
Then take some of those dreams and go do them. Maybe everyone else tells you that you can’t do something or that you’re crazy to try. Let them believe that, then come back and tell them what it was like. Others may choose to live without living, but me: I live.
In the news
- Maybe we should outlaw grey skies: Rainfall autism theory suggested
- How about adult’s play? Child’s play ‘better than a jog’
- Ack! She has cooties! Women’s hands ‘harbour more bugs’
Quote for the week
If you have only two pennies left in the world, with the first penny, you should buy rice to feed your family. With the second penny, say the wise Japanese, you should buy a lily. – Japanese Proverb
Healthy thoughts,
Jeff
