I’m best at dreaming.
Dreaming has never been the problem for me—the problem comes in writing out the dream and pushing send.
My heart circles around acting on ideas quite often. Usually I’m out amongst friends or reading something when an idea like a gust of some creative wind sweeps up an idea and blows it right by my face. I’ve had several (thousand) of these moments in the passed few years, but not many have left that moment.
I want to go for something.
Not just anything—something. Something my soul has been whispering to me these passed twenty plus years, but I haven’t had the right ears to understand it. It’s that same something that is the reason I like being in front of big crowds; or why words have always drawn me in; or even why I’m so attracted to music and how people respond it. It’s the something that is already me, I just haven’t been aware of it.
Chances are, I may already be doing it. In fact, I am most likely doing it more than I have realized, but I have just been sneaking it passed my doubt and self-realizations so as not to recognize the makings of myself.
Staying in the lines of life is a comfortability I can no longer risk. There’s just too much at stake, and I feel my soul has started to wake up from its long slumber.
Right now, I’m living in the scene of the movie where the main character realizes he loves the girl, and so he takes off racing to her place in the rain, trying to catch her before she takes the flight to some foreign address where it would just be too impossible to reach her. It’s the “wake up and see what’s in front of you,” scene. And as the strings are furiously playing in the background, people in the audience of my life have started leaning forward in their seats to see if I’m going to catch her.
I’m in a movie with my own dreams. It’s taken since the early years of high school, but these dreams of traveling and writing and performing haven’t shifted from my heart. Actually, they’ve grown quite a bit more intense. And it has been that recent realization that these dreams aren’t going anywhere, so they must be staying for a reason.
The hesitation has been on my own behalf.
It has always been either the fear of self-approving my works, or the tragedy of committing to something wholeheartedly, only to wake up a few months later and realize I don’t love it anymore. That’s the worst, because it’s me betting my life on the wrong thing.
These scenarios haunt me and cause me to hide in my shell of conformity and living inside of “sure things.”
If I am on my own faith, I tend not to go for great things.
I’d like to maintain the control of my own life. It’s a very western philosophy, but it makes sense because it’s what teachers and books told me in school. But what the text doesn’t say is in trying to control life; I am sacrificing the faith to live outside my own lines. If I continue to live in the confidence of myself, then I can only explore based on the knowledge of what I already know—which isn’t much. So to bet my life on my own circumstances would leave me in a pretty small creative cycle.
Love overpowers indifference.
This chance looks different for different people. I’m sure at some point in my life it will encompass all areas of love, of career, travel, family, and God. Right now, the thing I’m betting my life on is the dream placed in my heart for desire’s sake. It is the risk unpopular to conformity, but the one I have to take so when I’m forty I’m not writing about how “I wish I had tried ____________________.” Knowing I put my life intosomething has to count as meaningful.
It’s worth more to try and fail than it is to dream standing still.
-Jason O’Toole
(Source: memoir.jasonotoole.com)
Tweet
