What does it feel like to actually live your dreams?

I guess it depends on what type of person you are, and what dreams we’re talking about.

I think for a certain type of person, with a certain type of relationships and experiences, it can feel like The Alchemist:

"And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

For the rest of us, it can feel like you’re finally expressing the truth and beauty that you were put on this earth to create, and no one cares but your long-suffering wife. It can feel like a hard truth that your dreams are just another charge of the sun’s energy disappearing into a universe doomed by entropy, significant like a cow’s fart. That's how the universe is really conspiring.

For a certain type of dream, it can feel like an adventure as big as The Odyssey or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which no one else will ever know about.

A lot of times it’s an unusual flavor of embarrassing. Imagine you were given the chance, right now, to bat last in the World Series. Bases are loaded, bottom of the 9th, two outs, you’re down by one. Is that really a dream? Imagine how that is likely to play out - how people will talk about you afterwards.

It feels like you’ll never really get the recognition you deserve, and it feels embarrassing that you think you deserve recognition. But it feels like in order to succeed you have to convince yourself that you deserve recognition. You at least have to think that you can help.

I'm being dramatic though. Most times it’s more basic than that. It feels like working hard at something and finding out that somebody appreciates it.

We all have our people, and pursuing your dreams a lot of times just feels like doing what we can to make their lives better, expressing something that they think is important, and encouraging them that life’s fine. Good even. It feels like telling a good joke at a party and a few people laughing, or baking a pie that your coworker talks about for weeks afterwards. It can feel like encouraging a friend going through a divorce that things will get better, and seeing them through until it does.

A lot of times it feels like any other job.

A lot of times it feels like counting down the days on vacation until you have to go back to work.

I don’t know if at some point it eventually feels genuinely fulfilling.

I think it probably does.

As always, thanks for reading. For lots more, jump to Books