Here’s your life, would you like paper or plastic??

Have you ever noticed that life seems so scripted these days?  It’s like you wait in line to be handed a life that someone else thinks you should have.  They bag it up, give you instructions on how to use it and send you on your way.  Think about it, when we are 4 or 5 years old we start school.  For the next 12 or so years, we are groomed and taught according to a system that may or may not be severely flawed at this point and after that, we find a job working for someone else.  We are taught to believe that that is simply what you do with yourself when you graduate high school (quite often while you are still in high school).  You run your life according to someone else’s rules & schedule.  You go to work, punch a time clock, sacrifice an ungodly amount of your time to someone who may or may not appreciate you, punch the time clock again (with your fist if you’re lucky) and then go home just to get up and do it again the next day.  Sounds more like indentured servitude to me… 

Even your lifestyle is determined by someone else.  If you work for someone that pays you $25.00 per hour and works you 60 hours per week you may end up with lots of money but you would have no time to have a life…on the other hand, if you work for someone who pays you $8.00 per hour but only works you 20 hours per week, you would have all kinds of time to have a life but absolutely no money.  The hard reality is you don’t get to have both…in real life you get to have one or the other: money or time.  The car you drive, house/neighborhood you live in, school your kids attend, clothes you wear, etc are all determined by someone else.  We are like robots with pre-programmed choices that we have little to no control over. 

Personally, I think life should be more like a buffet—choose as much as you want of as much as you want and if you really like something, go back for more!  Lately (as in the past year or so), I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I really want to do with my life.  After all, I’m 28 so I should probably start figuring that out.  A very close friend/teacher/mentor of mine has always said “chase your dream” to me and all of the other students in our department at school (for those of you that don’t know, I am in college working on my Bachelor degree).  That phrase has stuck with me.  I have realized that life doesn’t have to be a series of canned presentations and scripts but rather a journey full of choices, risks, failures & successes, heartbreaks, sorrows, rewards, and ultimately, happiness.  The only way to fully experience that journey is to chase your own dream(s). 

So let me pose a question to you all: What is your dream and are you doing what it takes to attain it?  Once more, WHAT IS YOUR DREAM AND ARE YOU DOING WHAT IT TAKES TO ATTAIN IT?  If you don’t write it down and/or say it out loud, you will never really know what it is and neither will anyone else.  I have realized that once I put it out in the world what my dream is, people all around me were excited and ready to help me achieve it. So here it is (again)…

I am a musician…I eat, sleep, and breathe music.  It’s my love, my passion, and my life.  Of course I’m also a mom, wife, and daughter, but music is what makes me tick.  My dream is to teach other musicians how to fine tune their craft and help them reach their dreams as well.  I want to perform (and get paid for it), teach (and get paid for it), and write/arrange music (and get paid for it)!!  That is my dream…I want to get paid to play…music!  What could possibly be better than making a living doing what you love to do, when you want to do it, because you want to do it?  Then you do get to have time AND money!  Someone else is still writing your paychecks but you’re working & living according to your own terms and that, I think, is what it’s really all about.  That’s what true freedom is and that is my dream.

Sometimes, chasing our dreams can seem all but impossible.  Life itself gets in the way and derails even the best made plans.  My suggestion: have a plan but keep it flexible.  Know that life will interrupt you along the way and will sometimes force you to put your dreams on hold for a bit, but always make sure you come back to them as soon as you get LIFE mopped up and out of your way.  99% of the time we are our own worst enemies because we will have one little (like nanogram little) setback and we throw in the towel because it’s too “hard” to keep going.  And then we fall back into our canned life because it’s comfortable and “easy.” Really??  Spinning your wheels in static motion is easy?  Sounds tiring (pun intended) to me.  If you’re not moving forward in your journey, you need to make a change.  Get some traction under those wheels and get moving. 

I think that is a big part of the problems our country (and world) face right now.  We all get complacent in what we are doing and when one tiny little thing goes wrong, we use it as an excuse to just do nothing.  100 years ago, if you thought like that, you didn’t survive.  Do you think a farmer in 1911 whose crops were wiped out by floods just threw in the towel and said “oh well, I guess I’ll just sit here and starve to death with my family because I suck at being a farmer”?  NO…they dug in their heels and found a way to make the best of what they had.  They figured out how to make the best of a bad set of circumstances.  They changed their thinking and then used whatever they had to make it work because they HAD to.  They couldn’t just go down the street to the grocery store and buy what they needed for the week...

How do I know this you ask?  Because, if people over the centuries had just thrown in the towel when LIFE got in their way, I would not be here right now typing this ridiculously long blog post on my widescreen laptop computer and you would not be there reading it on yours.   Progress happens when we decide not to throw in the towel but just to get it wet and clean up the messes that life puts in our way. 

That is all for tonight.  I invite you to post a comment and tell the world what YOUR dream is and then don’t be afraid to go after it.  It’s never too late to change your life and become what you always wanted to be.  To sound a little cliché, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”…words to live by!