Almost thirty years ago I had an eye-opening experience that brought such clarity I can still relive it with pristine exactness all these years later. But before I get to that, let me give you a little backstory.
I majored in theater in college. I loved everything about it: long rehearsals, late nights, hanging out with the cast and crew, costumes, lights, singing, dancing, learning to understand people better by learning to understand the character I was playing, making art that impacted an audience in some profound or simple way, being a part of something bigger than me. I could go on and on about all the things I loved and learned from my stage experience. It’s not hard to appreciate a roomful of people applauding you when you finish your job. I have a passion for learning, so I thrived on pursuing my education in theater as well as all the other subjects I studied.
I married right out of college, all starry-eyed and dreaming of raising a family. We started having kids soon after. My life looked very different than it had in college. I didn’t just put acting on the back burner; I pretty much took it off the stove altogether so I could focus on raising our little boys. My days and nights rolled past with changing diapers, wiping noses, soothing tears, refereeing squabbles, cleaning up endless messes, dealing with way too little sleep, and way too much laundry. Gone were the days of studying stimulating topics and people applauding and going out of their way to tell me what a good job I had done.
It was hard, but I wasn’t unhappy. The joy of living with adorable little humans was ample compensation. The days, however, tended toward a sameness. It was challenging coming to terms with the fact that no matter how many times I fed my family they would always need to eat again before too long. No matter how often I cleaned anywhere it would be dirty almost as soon as I finished, and it was impossible ever to have all the laundry clean since we were always wearing some of it. Raising a family and keeping a house are relentless jobs with no paycheck to validate your efforts.
So, on one of these routine days back in the long ago times of VCRs, I had put a movie on to keep the boys occupied long enough for me to make the kitchen habitable. (It’s a lovely thing to walk across a floor without sticking to it.) I was sweeping away when the movie ended and popped out of the player. The TV reverted to whatever channel it had been on before, and I heard a voice I recognized coming from it. I looked up to see a college friend of mine on the screen.
There she was. An actress. On TV! My first thought was how happy I was for her. She was living her dream! In the next minute, it hit me that that could’ve been me. It suddenly became very real that I could have been living a very different life than I was – a life of costumes, characters, bright lights, and regular validation for the work I did.
With the reality of that possibility staring me in the face, I had the chance to ask myself if I would want to trade what I had for that life. Would I rather have the autonomy, the variety, the praise of an actor’s life or the oh, so unglamorous life I had?
It only took a split second to know my answer.
My commonplace life included a man who loved and supported me, sweet kisses from dirty little faces, small arms wrapped around me infusing my heart with a love I had never known possible. Their pure young hearts trusted me to teach them, and wanted me, their mom, when they had questions, or got hurt, or felt happy, or sad, or confused. The light in their eyes lit me up on an almost daily basis.
I was living my dream. It was easy to lose sight of that among the piles of dishes, toys, and of course laundry. It didn’t always look or feel like I thought it would (or should), but it was my dream, nonetheless. I had never in my life been so content to go back to sweeping a floor.
Living our dreams energizes and enlivens us – but only if we stop and look around long enough to recognize that that’s what we’re doing. Too many of us miss out on our dreams not because we’re not living them but because we don’t realize we are that that’s what we’re doing. Too many of us miss out on our dreams not because we’re not living them but because we don’t realize we are. When they first took hold in our hearts and became our dreams, we didn’t imagine the hard or boring parts. That’s not often the nature of dreaming. But our dreams are only complete with all the aspects of them, the exhilarating and inspiring along with the challenging and exhausting.
Be sure you’re living your dream…but realize your dream won’t always look the way you imagined. At times it will seem much more mundane and require a lot more hard work than you thought it would. It will stretch you beyond your current limits, which is never comfortable, but that only means your limits will expand. That means personal growth and progress, which, in turn, brings satisfaction and fulfillment. And isn’t that what dreams are for?