Who is the person that you dream you want to be? How does she look, and dress and feel in her own skin? Is she strong and healthy? When you picture this ideal you Is she 30 pound lighter than you are today?
How does she, this ideal you, fill her days? What does her home look and feel like? Is it peaceful or chaotic? Does it smell like lavender or roses or cinnamon? Does her home reflect her dreams and values, through the books on the shelf, the food in the pantry, the beautiful nightwear hanging invitingly in the closet?
What about her social life? I’ll bet she surrounds herself with people, especially other women who love and support her, who encourage her to thrive. I’ll bet, her relationships are positive, and full of laughter, positivity.
So I will ask the question, why do we settle for anything less? Is there a gap in the life you live today and the ideal life you want to live?
Last week, in a discussion about goals and dreams, one of my students said he couldn’t wait to graduate, so he could “start “his life. Another said she couldn’t wait to finish University because she wanted to write a book. Of course, neither of these young people had to wait for anything. Life has already started, and you can write without a degree. I did understand them and I saw myself in both comments.
Sometimes, we think we need some milestone to pass before we can live that dream life. We tell ourselves, we will do it, after we graduate, when we get married, when we get our own apartment, when we have children, when they move out, the list goes on.
There are always nebulous-some-days where we neatly file our dreams away, promising to unpack them at the appropriate time. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, I have found that dreams don’t pack well. They move on to someone who will act.
Annie Dillard, in her book , The Writing Life said, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”
I will confess, I have been putting off many aspects of my dream life until “after I retire,” when in fact having a fabulous garden should not be dependent upon my current employment circumstances, nor should a daily walking habit, or should publishing lovely blog posts several times every week.
Sometimes we think that we want something, but our actions tell a different story. Our true desires can be found in these three value indicators;
- How we spend our time.
- How we spend our money.
- What we are willing to sacrifice to have it.
It was William James who first suggested, “if you want to have a quality, act as if you have it.” In my religious upbringing, I remember hearing the same message shouted into a microphone by an old preacher, “It’s not enough to believe it, you’ve got to walk it out in shoe leather.”
So, in the last little while, I have been thinking of that ideal personna, my highest self, and I ask, what would she do in this pocket of time? What would she choose to eat? Would she wear those clothes to the grocery store? Who would she want to spend time with? What would she read or watch? As we fill our lives with who we want to be, we have less and less patience for settling for less.
It’s not enough to have a dream, we have an obligation to that higher self, that ideal version, to close the gap and live our most abundant life.
