Do We Need a Big Dream?
You see it all over: Find your passion! Live your dreams! Create the BIG life you’ve always wanted!
Arg!
It seems we are all about “living our dream” nowadays, but there’s something about that wording that puts many of us on edge. We feel there is something wrong with us if we haven’t crystallized some big vision for our lives. Or if we aren’t immediately in touch with some bodacious, juicy passion that inspires singing on mountain tops.
I saw it again the other night at a party where we were asked to “name our life purpose” and wear it on our nametag. A few had no problem. But when reading the instructions, many of us looked like deer in the headlights. We looked around surreptitiously to see if anyone had noticed that we were not gleefully writing away, perhaps complaining that there wasn’t enough room to describe every last detail.
Sometimes we can’t figure out what we want for breakfast, let alone the rest of our lives.
The error in thinking is that somehow we are incomplete if we don’t always have a big dream on our radar. What if instead passion came from listening to, then following, small flickers of desire? You know, those things we miss when we are always looking at the horizon.
We don’t hear these often quiet calls when we are rushing through life looking somewhere else, but when we slow down and see what lights us up, even just a bit, those flickers shyly arise. As we follow them, moment to moment, we find ourselves naturally moving on purpose.
Last month I was out in the country on a mini-retreat, lost in thought in a rocking chair, when suddenly I heard a horse whinny. There was the flicker. My ears perked up. As a child, I had ridden horses, competed in jumping and was even the one at the stable cleaning out manure just to be near them.
I could have ignored it. Instead, I followed my desire and found the horse, petting her velvet nose over the fence as I inhaled the smell of hay and earth. My whole body responded with a shiver. I continued to follow this desire and two weeks later visited a friend on a ranch I hadn’t seen in years, blissfully hugging her muscled horses and making plans to ride.
Who knows where this will lead? It doesn’t matter because it has already opened moments of joy sprinkled among the possibilities.
Big dreams are wonderful. Yet they are only one of many paths to happiness. Another is listening to those subtle flickers of desire that lead to fully lived moments. The coconut smell of sunscreen that reminds you how much you love the beach. The moment on a walk when you bend over your neighbor’s rose bush and deeply breathe, awakening summers in your grandmother’s garden.
These moments light up our world like fireflies as they glow and spread out through the darkness. They may even point the way to a big dream. But more vitally, they open us to a bigger life, day in and day out...