It’s funny how we reveal the kind of people we are even in simple aspects of life. Let’s take the example of a travelling holiday. There’s the get-there-at-all-costs-and-put-a-flag-on-the-peak person and there’s the meander, stop, savour, meander a bit more type of person. And let me say this. They’re both getting what they want … and they’re both missing out on something.
People who are wired to keep heading towards the destination miss out on the joy and depth of the experience of staying a little longer in one place. Others who stay and savour run out of time for some of the exciting things up ahead. They don’t have the benefit of the extra distance or the enjoyment of the race.
So, whatever we choose in life, we’re missing out. If I want to try everything and never settle to any one hobby or career, I miss the opportunity of the deep dive. I might enjoy the surface skimming life, but the busyness of doing all things at once means never really experiencing the peace and the kind of happy certainty that comes from knowing one subject well. And of course the opposite is true. I’m not living a well rounded life if I put all my energy into just one activity.
Compromise is equally problematic. If I try to be both people at once I will likely find that it can’t be done and I will be living my life at a hand gallop but never really feel that I am truly accomplishing anything.
I think there’s a reason the saying is, Live the Dream. Singular. Because if I try to live all my dreams, I have too many half-baked visions swirling around in my head to do any of them justice. In the end, I think it’s the same for most people.We don’t choose the one dream. We try to fit it all in and in doing so have a great deal of pleasure from playing in many puddles but none of the true contentment of having immersed ourselves in one deep pool.
At the very end of my life I’d like have accomplished my one big dream. Naturally, the precursor to that is knowing what the one big dream is. That takes thought and a kind of curating process which can be rather uncomfortable. But even if I only edit my life partially I’m sure that I will find that a great deal of the busyness and bustle is just so much chaff that I can easily live without once I’ve been brave enough to identify and evict it. With the space that’s created, the truly important will become much more obvious.
And if the time-consuming and sometimes painful winnowing process leads through the fog to clarity on the other side, it’s worth the soul searching.