This week I heard from a friend I hadn’t talked to in years. After we caught up about everyday life, he confided in me that he lived alone in a three thousand square foot four bedroom house, and huge mortgage to go with it. At first, I thought he was proud, and then his next text came and he said, “I feel completely stuck and I can’t retire for years”. He went on to say his j-o-b and his big house and his big mortgage was enslavement, not liberation. Can you relate? I know in my past I could. Living way over my means and thinking I needed all that.
Juxtapose this interaction with seeing a young adult friend I mentor with at yoga the other night. She looked absolutely radiant, bursting with excitement, telling me how she just got back from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Cost Rica. How she learned to surf, travel alone with just a backpack and how she was going back out in December.
I walked away thinking, “when did this so called “American Dream” become a nightmare?
Perhaps sometime after the divorce, the estrangement, the pandemic, the job that beat us down, even referred to as the “daily grind”, the loss of family and friends, the chaos, the ghosting and the ingrained patterns that keep us stuck. Mainly, the thinking we can’t do that…basically stuck as my first friend had decided.
Remember when you woke as a child, before all the trappings? It’s time to believe again in the fantasy that just could actually be a reality.
It’s time to decide if we want to live and feel fully alive, or if we just want to exist. We were meant to thrive! To be happy! To learn to surf the waves of positivity. To seek nectar. To resist nothing if it calls us! Don’t engage with negative people (I had to let several go lately), and run toward your craziest dreams, because those are usually the truest.
What are the gifts you have to share? For me, that is what brings me on the road in the Silver Savior. I want to share in that hope and inspiration and connectivity that we are all starving for in what seems a world gone mad.
As I take you with me on the road, I want to take you on an adventure. To start anew. Not starting over, but starting anew. A new sense of purpose, passion and aliveness. On what counts.
Begin with this question:
What gives you the most energy in your life? Write your most laugh out loud dream from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to sleep. In detail. Where? With whom? What is your day filled with?
In other words, as they say, if you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do? I know change is hard, I have fears and doubts even as I write this. But, as David Foster Wallace said, “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it”.
But what if that leap is the smartest thing we could ever do?
I would love to hear about your thoughts, dreams and actions. Let’s do this together. And perhaps interview you on your NEW American Dream….
See you in the breakers,
Nancy