Since before I can remember I have had certain dreams. Dreams that may or may not come true for me in my life. A time of grieving has followed that acceptance. And realizing that life will not be everything that I dreamt it would be has been a process.
I have spent an awful lot of time recently in prayer and contemplation of what exactly my life is worth and why exactly I feel so unsatisfied with where I am and what I am doing. I have come to some realizations about myself that I would like to share.
I think I have been spending too much time waiting. Waiting to mold myself around some life that would appear before me. Something perfect. Yes, I think I have been waiting for some perfect plan that I could wrap myself around and therefore become a perfect person. And somehow I have thought that this perfection would come as a product of waiting for a perfect moment.
Looking around me, I see no perfection and I am realizing that there is no perfect plan headed my way. Waiting, therefore, has left me paralyzed to a degree and has prevented me from really living.
I don’t mean to say that my dreams are not good or righteous. I don’t mean to say that it is a bad thing to make goals or decisions about what you want in life. I am saying and beginning to believe that such dreams can become an obstacle. If we obsess over them, worry over them and spend too much of our time dreaming about them, we miss the moment that we are in. And this very moment that we are in is really all that we have. It is all that we have. Without living today it is as if we do not exist. Without living today we would be a memory or a dream but nothing real.
You may have made this discovery long ago. I thought that I knew these things. Only over the past few days have I really felt what this means for me.
There are moments when I want to morn and regret my past or opportunities that are gone. Things that I desperately wish I could take back or things that I wish so badly I had known earlier in my life; mistakes that could have been avoided if I had known. There have been moments when I should have reached out to others but didn’t. There have been moments when I have let real love slip through my fingers.
I often find myself regretful. It is easy to look back and let memories take over, robbing me of joyous experiences that are all around me.
The point of all of this is that I am tired of waiting and I am tired of regretting.
And so, childhood dreams aside. The hope of marriage and children and my own home aside and the possibility that these things may not ever come to me in this life, I have a decision to make. What do I want? What do I want to be and do? Or see or experience? What can the world give me or what can I give it?
I do not yet know the answers to these fabulous questions. What I do know is that I am going to figure out the answers and then I am going to go and do the things that I want to do. That’s right, I’m going to do what I want and grab hold of every bit of joy that I can because that, my friend, is living in the moment. What lies before me is opportunity. A whole wide world of opportunity for me to figure out what I will be.
Instead of expecting to arrive at some destination of perfection, I hope that I will be aware of what is going on around me and understand what part I want to play this world.
