When it comes to pursuing “the dream”, we have at least four ways available to us…
- We can dare to go for it, going through the motions the best we know how; always adapting, quietly correcting our course, letting the doubters doubt; trying different iterations and variations of the vision as we go through life, honing our skills and refining our art… It stands there, the ultimate end, informing all decisions, and we trust implicitly our aspiration, living purposefully and deliberately in all we do.
- We can push forward doggedly, never faltering until it is realized, driven and undeterred. Life inevitably throws us obstacles, but we embrace them as signs of the road to achievement; barriers are our greatest teachers. We use them to direct our momentum ever toward the prize in our eyes.
- We have the vision, usually quite early in life, and find it again from time to time. As we dance along the periphery, never really diving deeply into the discovery, challenges and failures, we suffer quietly, desperately, as it remains forever just out of reach. We never commit to it beyond mere fits and starts, instead opting to heed the ideas and beliefs of others who are in the same boat or sphere of reality. Life takes its turns, and additional aspects of the story we compose also receive sporadic fragments of our energy and focus.
- We can live the perpetually evolving, flowing, drifter’s dream, never too attached to any one outcome; ever open and free to change our minds, heed our hearts, and trust that things are always working out for us. The goal is to live the journey, moment to moment, present and engaged in everything we put our efforts to.
Wherever we are, we are there fully, completely, or we do ourselves a disservice. Now is what matters, breath by breath.
Solvitur ambulando
photo: English Bay Beach, c. May 2007 “Ancient Observer”