We were asked, as you always are, “what is your dream?”
Jim Collins called them BHAGs: big, hairy, audacious goals but this was an all-female gathering so the terminology was softer, but the question was the same: what is the no-holds-barred dream?
There were wonderful dreams around that table. There were also mundane ones. But here’s the question that wasn’t addressed: what happens when you achieve the dream? What happens when you arrive? What then? Have you ever wondered what it is like to, actually, in real time, live the dream?
If not, then I suggest you do. Because if you do not step out of the ‘achievement’ of creating the business, becoming a star, moving to the back-of-beyond, or whatever else it might be for you…then you miss the point. That bit – creating the business, becoming a star, moving to the back-of-beyond – is the doorway, the landing gate at the airport. Once you step through it, you then have to continue “living”.
Look at the wording: living the dream, not achieving the goal. Big difference.
Living the dream is what happens next. It is how you continue to live in that world that you have envisaged. I suspect that the reason it becomes a nightmare for so many people is mistaking achieving the dream scenario – which is just the backdrop – for living the dream life – which probably has as much mundanity and as many pitfalls as any other kind of life.
Dreams were expounded around the table: career ambitions, charitable aims, cheering-up-my-home next steps. Dreams and goals with no real thinking about the difference between the two, and no consideration of the ‘then what?’ – the question of how it will be to live that life once you’ve achieved it.
Later in the day, I would unearth some of the things that I am working on, that maybe count as goals, but they’re actually quite small ones. Things I’m working towards, but not emotionally attached to. They’re work-in-progress things, not goals, not dreams, just work.
(I hate that pernicious little word ‘just’ – but in this case it does apply. These things are ‘just’ work. Work that may or may not become something, and either result is ok.)
Before that, however, in the moment of the question, my response was: I’m going to be quite radical here: I don’t have any dreams or goals. I am already living the life I want to live. I really want more of the same, maybe better, but really, I love this life I already have.
Put on the page it almost sounds arrogant, or complacent. It is neither of those things. It is the recognition that the sign on my hall chiffonier is accurate: my ideal life is now my reality.
I walk past that sign many times a day. It is there in acknowledgement most days, but It is also there because of the days when I don’t feel the truth of it, when I need the reminder.
Over lunch, some-one asked me what it was like to be living the dream. The truth is that it is surprisingly ordinary. The dream, when it becomes reality, becomes normal. What that looks and feels like obviously depends on what the dream was in the first place.
I have to admit that I have come about this from the other end. Whenever I did the ‘ideal life’ exercise, I dreamt up very different scenarios. This dream life that I am living isn’t one that I set out to achieve.
What happened to me was that when the seismic shift of my life that I’ve written about elsewhere occurred, I ended up here. Then I wrote about being here. I wrote a lot of what next, what now questioning things…and then at some point I stood on a cold, wintery beach, utterly exhilarated, and screeched into the wind: THIS! JUST MORE AND MORE OF THIS!
You feel a bit silly doing that.
And then, if you’re serious about working out who you are meant to be, you stop feeling silly and pick up a pen. Then you just write. Ordinary stuff. Creative stuff. You write things that might be poems. You write things that might be stories. You write letters that you will send, and ones that you will immediately burn.
You live your way through lockdowns, and re-openings.
You get brave and tell people that maybe it is time to walk away. And however bad you feel about hurting them, you know it is the right thing to have done for you, to not have them in your life anymore.
You get brave and say “Yes” to other people, who you never expected to meet and who pull you in directions you never expected to go.
Bravery. That’s the thing no-one tells you about living the dream: just how brave you are going to have to be; how many times you are going to have to step out into a spotlight; how many times you are going to volunteer to do something and then really, REALLY, wish you hadn’t; how many times you will carry on regardless. And how many times you will find that you, actually, whisper it quietly, truly relish being in that spotlight.
They also don’t tell you that the bravest thing you will do is learn how to ask for help, and how many people will rally to your cause when you do so.
You will write so many things until one day you realise that the life you really want to live is the one you already have.
It is imperfect, still. Of course it is. There are gaps in it, still. But you wake up one morning and step outside your back door onto a garden that’s got a bit scrappy, but today is bright and frost-white, and you listen to the robin in the holly tree over the back fence, and you think about the unexpectedness of everything, and you smile.
You think about the people in your life, who were not here five years ago.
You think about the silliness and playfulness.
You think about swimming in pools and in the sea.
You think about dancing.
You think about how many writing projects you have on the go that will never be finished but are still worth the words.
You think about making submissions and competition entries, and go back to your desk to do that.
You think about the times that worked. And the ones that didn’t.
You think about just coming to the page and putting the words down and seeing if they work.
The thing about living the dream is that it remains very much more about living than it does about the dream.
I was doing the living, before I realised that it was the dream that was now real.
I haven’t suddenly become a perfect version of me. I am still a recovering achievement-addict. I still feel a need for external validation. I want people to love, like and respect me. I want them to love, like and respect the work. I want the work to move people. But there are no longer any specific goals to be achieved.
I hear Mark Knopfler singing “…and now your dream is real”
The dream is real, but continuing to do the work is part of the dream; having the luxury of time in which to do the work is the dream; having the luxury of finance and other resources with which to do the work is the dream; having the motivation to actually put in the effort is the dream; finding inspiration to feed the work is the dream; knowing that at least sometimes the work lands the way I want it to do so is the dream.
Living the dream is NOT about having achieved everything you wanted to achieve and just lying back in the sun by the pool.
Living the dream is about knowing your purpose and being in a position of having the time and space and resources and inspiration and motivation to keep on keeping on in that direction. And doing so. It is about knowing that stumbling is ok, because you know you’ll get up again. It is about doing what you love, even when (especially when) that doesn’t come as easily as you want it to. It is about knowing that it is all, absolutely, worth it.
Or maybe that’s just me, just my dream…
….that I’m lucky enough to be living.
