Dreams and Goals

Exploring one of life's most important questions.....

“Do you have a dream?”

I received this text from my dear friend, Paul, on a Monday evening a few weeks ago. Out of the blue, he prefaced the question by saying I didn’t need to have an answer and that he was curious because it was the first time he was seriously thinking about it in the context of his own life.

Not only do I love this question and have thought about it myself for a while, I had just finished watching All of Us Strangers (highly recommend) and was feeling quite in the mood to sit and reflect upon the answer I was going to share with Paul. In typical fashion for our relationship since he moved to Boston in April, we had agreed to meet for a beer at MJ O’Connor’s the following evening. So, this gave me time to really reflect on what I wanted to say to him.

In my short twenty-three years on Earth, one of the only ever-present and consistent things about life is that…..well, life is actually never consistent. We constantly experience change, both in the short-term and the long-term. In the short-term, we change what we wear and what we eat on a daily basis. We change what we do one Friday night from the next, as we always seek to find some variability in the “day-to-day.” In the long-term, we see friendships mature and grow, as well as dissipate and reignite. We also experience drastic changes in lifestyles, going from high-school to college to the working world.

Change is important because it forces us to adapt, grow, and improve ourselves to acclimate to new circumstances and situations. I’m not denying that change can be and is difficult or unwanted at times. We also fail sometimes when confronted with change. But, all of those experiences are part of being human.

Often, it is within this tension that we feel most alive. We are confronted with leaving behind a place, person, or situation that we have become comfortable with and enter into something that is completely foreign to us. On the surface, that totally makes sense. We love and crave comfortability, and often choose to run away from those things that leave us feeling exposed, vulnerable, and lonely. But, if we decided to live our lives this way all the time, we would have never left elementary school when all we had to worry about was recess or whose parent packed the best lunch that day.

I vividly remember the same feeling that would arise every summer before I transitioned to a new school. After graduating 8th grade, while there was definitely excitement of finally being in high school and the thought of joining “the big leagues,” I was incredibly nervous of the change I was about to experience. The same happened before I went to college. And while the specifics of these circumstances vary, it is the change itself that drives the nerves and anxiety of entering into this new life.

Fortunately, I am able to look back upon countless situations during those periods of change that I am eternally grateful for because of what I learned about myself along the way. Many of these moments were challenging and emotional, and I sometimes would try and do anything to get out of it. But, I am a better person for having endured each of those experiences, and have gained incredible amounts of knowledge and maturity.

At its core, that is what the cycle of life is all about. While I have all of these experiences to draw back upon to guide me for when the next change occurs in my life, there are still plenty of situations where I will be nervous and even apprehensive to enter into. If I am lucky enough one day, I will make the transition into becoming a father, husband, manager, etc. And while there is plenty of excitement and gratitude that comes along with that, it is also something I feel incredibly nervous about.

I know that there is nothing I can do to fully prepare myself to take on those roles. All I know is that I have to enter into those experiences, when the time comes, with love, compassion, and an unrelenting desire to learn from my experience as each day passes. It is through adaptation, learning, and a sense of humility that allows us to grow into the best version of ourselves. And at the end of the day, that’s all that we can do.

As a kid, I dreamed of becoming all the classics: an astronaut, a pilot, a professional athlete, the President, etc. As I’ve gotten older, those ideas have stayed as they always have been: dreams. While they have all become unrealistic or uninteresting, I have never let go of the spirit that fueled those thoughts. I still allow myself to dream of all the different lifestyles that sound interesting to me now as a young adult.

(My friends have heard this plenty of times, but I thought it would be fun to share some of them with you: a sheep farmer in New Zealand, a journalist in Central or South America, a lumberjack in Canada, an English teacher in Southeast Asia, an environmental lawyer in the Pacific Northwest, an immigration lawyer in Arizona, a florist in The Netherlands, a renowned author who gets to travel the world, a baker in Paris, and even owning my own Bed & Breakfast in the Basque region of Northern Spain.)

While I hope that any one of these turns out to be true, at least for now, I recognize that the social, economic, and political climate the world currently finds itself in might never allow me to realize any of these. And that’s okay. Because all of the above-mentioned lifestyles have one thing in common: building meaningful community and relationships with others.

That was my answer to Paul.

I have never had a true “ dream” job or a true “dream” lifestyle. Hell, I don’t even have a “dream” house or city that I feel called to be in. The one thing I do feel called to do is to be in relation with other people and to make those as meaningful and emotional as they can be. Whether as a friend, father, husband, or coworker, it is paramount to me to enrich those relationships to the fullest extent that I can. And while it will never be perfect or without struggle, keeping that desire at the forefront of what I do will allow myself to give the best of myself on a consistent basis.

School, jobs, friends, apartments, lifestyles all come and go in our lives. Change always happens and we can never avoid it. Because of this, I have committed myself to making the most of relationships and time spent in each experience and journey of my life.

My best friends from elementary school didn’t continue to be my best friends once I got to high school. And that’s okay, because life isn’t always supposed to work that way.

But, there’s so much beauty in that.

We can’t take every person and every experience with us as we continue to mature and grow. But the memories of them, and the profound appreciation for the impact they had in our lives during that specific time period, can and should continue with us in our hearts. For it is through those past relationships and experiences that give us the foundation for our future endeavors.

I also believe that this line of thinking, and realization, allows us to better appreciate the people in our life who do stay with us throughout change. Family, of course, is principal among them. Paul, whom I became friends with junior year of high school, has seen me develop over the past eight years into the person I am today and will continue to bear witness to that as I get older, as I have done with him.

We need both types of relationships in our lives. Those that are meant for a specific period of time. And those that are meant for the rest of our lives. Certain people are great for certain moments. It would be unfair of us to expect them to be the same in every situation.

My dream, as I said to Paul, is to have deeply profound and intensely emotional relationships and experiences with people in my life. Whether they are for the short-term or the long-term, they make our lives as meaningful as they are supposed to be.

Love. And love fearlessly.