Living you dream and following your heart are topics which are getting a lot of air time lately. Yes, I am an advocate of following your heart and dreams, but I don’t agree (anymore) with the way it is portrayed as the solution to all your problems.
It is not (as I initially thought and previously also wrote about) the final page of a book, because nobody ever says in a soft voice ‘…and she lived happily ever after.‘
What does it even mean, to realize your dreams? Often this one particular point in life gets all the attention. The one jump towards the one dream. To live your dreams is, according to this way of thinking, a very short-lived sensation. At least, it would be for me. Because I don’t come with one dream only and I’m not done with one jump.
Maybe our dreams are free
Maybe there is a meta-level way of living your dreams, which means being free and able to realize your dreams over and over again.
Maybe dreams are like half-hidden provocative truths hiding behind a layer of lace, as my friend so nicely put it. You see them, but not totally. You can make out the outline, but mostly you have to imagine what is underneath. And when it’s about dreams in life, we fill this mystery with the most positive and alluring imagery we can muster.
We can get so hung up on one dream that we go through an entire lifetime wishing we had done something differently, wishing we had the courage, thinking life would have been better only if…
The thing is that if you do jump, if you peek under the lace, you may have a hell of a time, or you may find out that it wasn’t what you wanted after all. In my case instead of wishing for 30 years I had quit and moved to a tropical island when I had the chance, I did it, lived it and then realized it was nice but not forever-nice. This realization releases energy to dream further, to dream dreams I could not have imagined if I had not done the things I’ve done. Most importantly, I am not hung up on this one story for the rest of my life, and no picture of a white beach with a coconut tree will make me think life if better elsewhere. Been there, done that, now what else have you got for me, my dear Universe?
Living and moving on
What I am trying to say is this. Living a dream life and following your heart is not the one-jump-fix we often think it will be. It’s more of a lifestyle. It’s all about filling your years with several excursions, several jumps and several dreams that roll on and off smoothly. It’s about taking your dreams a little less seriously, and allowing them to be light. They don’t need to be for forever, because nothing is.
What we ought to also remember is that a dream is much more alluring under a seductive lace than standing bare chested in front of you. But don’t be fooled. Live your dream anyway, and then, simply move on.
