What’s Your Dream?

There is a dream that many people seek. It involves a combination of houses…cars…vacations…expensive hobbies…even more expensive vices and a lucrative occupation to support it all. Sometimes it’s called the American Dream.

The founding principle of this dream is fulfillment of our basic needs. This instinct, combined with the evolution of consumerism over the last century, results in the idea that things will make us happy. And if some is good, then more is better, right?

The dream is so ubiquitous, at some point, we adopted it as our own.

But is it?

When we unknowingly move towards someone else’s expectations for our life, we may begin at a sprinter’s pace. But, sooner or later the degree of effort required to continue to move counter our own values and purpose reflects our spirit’s resistance.

How do we prevent this fool’s errand when the storyline is pervasive and the motives of future comfort are not wholly invalid? First, as long as you continue pushing a merry-go-round, it will keep spinning. If you want it to slow down or even stop, you have to stop pushing it.

Where are you pushing?

Then, we pay attention. Looking around our lives past and present. Where does our attention linger? What brings us joy? What fires our passion? What generates energy for us? Living someone else’s plan for us is depleting. Living our plan for ourselves is energizing. Follow your energy.

Maybe you feel like your trajectory is deliberate already and you are living the dream you’ve chosen. Feels great, doesn’t it? Being true to yourself is the underpinning of integrity.

The gift in this surveillance of our lives is that it is rarely a discrete event, but rather an incremental process of trial, error, and validation. We can decide what stays and what goes…and when we are called to make room for something different.

Some changes are revolutionary. Most are evolutionary. A small shift, deliberately made, results in a big movement over time.

A lifespan is finite. There is no better time than now to ask yourself whose dream you’re living.