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(A tip of the hat to Tom Lehrer for the title.) This is yet another comment I posted elsewhere first.
The other day I had a minor bout of what-have-I-done-with-my-life. I get those from time to time. I figured we all do, especially around birthday time! I asked my beloved whether he ever got those. He said no.
No? Hmm.
Turns out when he was little he had goals. Go to MIT, start a high tech company. He did them. Check. Done!
(Now he has a similar feeling of "where do I go from here?" So from this moment on, we're in the same boat, in a way.)
Once he said that I realized something. When I was a child I didn't have goals. I had dreams. Most of those dreams I discarded for very sane reasons, many of them having to do with being a girl. (No Blue Angels for me.) But goals and dreams are different. Dreams are safe because you don't have to do anything; you don't have to risk failure. I never got around to making goals, because enough of my dreams simply weren't workable. I learned early that it was a bad idea to risk. (There's the difference between Rob's situation and mine. He knows he can achieve big goals. I "know" I can't.)
Now I have a bunch of discarded broken dreams, no goals achieved, and no one to blame for it butMom myself. (Sure, Mom broke a few of my dreams, but I can't blame her for being right. And it wasn't her job to come up with goals.) Veddy intedesting!
I still have dreams. I haven't fully let go of "be an astronaut", but of course that one's got to go. I'm 38 in three days and I have multiple chronic pain conditions. It's a non-starter. But there are other dreams I could turn into goals...
...if I had the courage. It'll take courage. It was painful enough when all the dreams broke; how much more will it hurt when I try for a goal?
But if I don't find that courage, all I'll have in another 37 years is discarded dreams and no one to blame for it but me. Right? RIGHT!
The other day I had a minor bout of what-have-I-done-with-my-life. I get those from time to time. I figured we all do, especially around birthday time! I asked my beloved whether he ever got those. He said no.
No? Hmm.
Turns out when he was little he had goals. Go to MIT, start a high tech company. He did them. Check. Done!
(Now he has a similar feeling of "where do I go from here?" So from this moment on, we're in the same boat, in a way.)
Once he said that I realized something. When I was a child I didn't have goals. I had dreams. Most of those dreams I discarded for very sane reasons, many of them having to do with being a girl. (No Blue Angels for me.) But goals and dreams are different. Dreams are safe because you don't have to do anything; you don't have to risk failure. I never got around to making goals, because enough of my dreams simply weren't workable. I learned early that it was a bad idea to risk. (There's the difference between Rob's situation and mine. He knows he can achieve big goals. I "know" I can't.)
Now I have a bunch of discarded broken dreams, no goals achieved, and no one to blame for it but
I still have dreams. I haven't fully let go of "be an astronaut", but of course that one's got to go. I'm 38 in three days and I have multiple chronic pain conditions. It's a non-starter. But there are other dreams I could turn into goals...
...if I had the courage. It'll take courage. It was painful enough when all the dreams broke; how much more will it hurt when I try for a goal?
But if I don't find that courage, all I'll have in another 37 years is discarded dreams and no one to blame for it but me. Right? RIGHT!
