Goals vs. Dreams
When you really want to do something, sometimes your own thoughts cave in and crush that idea flat as a pancake. The difference between goals and dreams is that goals stay flattened, but dreams tend to sprout up through the cracks of that crushing doubt and self criticism and, infuriatingly, flower in your minds eye day after day, month after month, year after year.
Dreams are the seeds that contain the blueprint for our own happiness and goals are the trellises that can either cripple these living things or support them as they germinate and grow.
When your life is made of a series of goals checked off an ever-growing list, a sense of accomplishment can still seem lacking in some way. Learning that what you thought were dreams are actually a series of goals can be disorienting and frustrating, because achievement is good right? And dreaming is aimless, non substantial, and doesn’t pay off right?
Since I was born a rule-breaker I wholeheartedly suggest taking at least one full year (sometimes two back to back lends even more clarity) searching for your dreams, as misaligned and random as they are, and recording them in some way. Your goals will still take care of themselves, by now you’re in so much of a habit that it might be a deep and depressing rut, so you don’t need to worry about continuing to achieve while you locate some wayward dreams, that machine will take care of itself.
A couple months in, you might feel a need to “refine” or “edit” your list of dreams because:
they don’t make sense
they aren’t practical
they would take too long
they may seem downright unhealthy
they would remove you from financial, emotional, or physical security
DO NOT EDIT YOUR LIST.
What you may find two, five, ten years down the road is that your circumstances have drastically changed and your concerns are no longer applicable. The world changes, and you may find that what was once a risk is now a necessary part of life (as terrifying as that may be in the present).
If anything on your list simply seems...dead...let it sit there and look for the living ideas sprouting up through the weight of internal pressures, storms, or devastating loss. The most frustrating thing is that they keep coming up, and the more you find the more seem to spontaneously sprout. The feeling of having lost something you’ve never even attained will make you hurt, and feel sad, when you see your little collection of neglected seedlings and don’t see anywhere you can plant them. This part sucks. It never really goes away, no grief ever really does.
When you can’t stand it anymore and make a drastic risky change in order to plant one of your dreams (when, not if) you’ll be trading some goals for one or two dreams. In a year’s time you’ll have made more little changes to plant more dreams, and let more goals sit abandoned in the background. After two or three years some of your dreams (maybe most of them) will have been planted, struggled, and died.
One or two will be THRIVING.
Five or ten years down the road, even those may have shriveled and died, which is mind-bending, and also perversely comforting. Living things have a life cycle, and it’s a rare thing to be able to predict the timing. The absurd miracle of the experience is that nurturing living things naturally results in an inherent provision, a form of intangible sustenance, sometimes poorly communicated using the metaphor of a vegetable garden, but still not fully defined.
The trauma of dreaming is that not every dream gets a chance to live, and even the ones that do will die at an unpredictable time. There is absolutely no indication that our chance interaction with them will supply more than they deplete.
The miraculous absurdity is - it does.
