You Either Live Your Dreams or You Don’t

Last updated on June 18th, 2024 at 03:19 pm

You live your dreams or don’t, and you are the only one accountable.  You can either have a litany of excuses or simply somehow make it happen. I am currently recommitting to making my writing a top priority. After all, I have six and a half weeks left before I meet with my writing coach again and six and a half weeks left to hit my next goal of 200 pages for my memoir.

If I write two pages a day, six days a week, for the next six weeks, I’ll hit that target and keep my promise to have a complete story draft on paper before meeting with my writing group in June. Then, I’ll have time to edit my manuscript before handing it to my writing coach in October.

Why Living Our Dreams Matters

When you commit to living a dream, something inside you will feel incomplete if you don’t give it your best shot—if you don’t, at least try. Here are some dictionary definitions of integrity:

• Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.

• The state of being unimpaired; soundness.

• The quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness.

When I break a promise to myself, and feel out of integrity, I do feel incomplete. I don’t know quite how to explain that feeling of “incompleteness,” but I know it’s what I felt during the years when I took a break from dancing. My ex-husband and I were professional dancers together, a teaching and performing team, traveling around the country for dance workshops and camps.

When we split up after six and a half years on the dance circuit together, I stopped doing lindy hop for a while. It was too painful to go to events and have everyone ask, “Where’s Adrian? How’s Adrian?” I simply couldn’t tell the story to one more person. Yet during the year and a half when I was away from lindy hop, traveling, and trying other activities, including yoga and belly dancing, there was always this nagging feeling that I should return to the dance world I had left behind.

I felt incomplete. There was always a gnawing sense inside of “something missing” in my life.

Getting back to dancing again, back on the circuit, was like taking a big, deep sigh of relief. I was right back home where I belonged with my dancer friends amid a subculture that I love. I danced until five a.m. again, shimmying and swiveling and challenging my body again, spinning in the arms of handsome men again, interpreting the music with my body again… Everything just felt right.

It still feels right to be out dancing regularly. My body craves it, and I feel out of kilter when I stop. Dancing feeds my soul, makes me happy, and is a deep-rooted source of joy and contentment.

 

My Soul is Calling Me to Write This Book

I have that feeling again right now about my writing. I am not committing myself to do all I need to do regularly to get my book written, and I feel it in my body. I have committed this time to myself, my faithful readers, and my new readers. I owe it to more than myself!

Due to a few busy weeks spent on the road traveling, I allowed myself to get knocked out of my regular writing schedule. I’m not quite back in it, although I promised myself I would return to writing ½ hour a day last week. I had so much work to catch up on and was exhausted after staying up all night dancing so many days in a row that… I didn’t do it.

And I feel that gnawing sense inside me now that I am not doing something I need to be doing. Something my soul is calling me to do.

Why Do We Deny Ourselves Our Soul’s Calling Sometimes?

There are dreams that we feel compelled to live because, at a soul level, we feel called to do the work. We get intrinsic pleasure from it. It feels like part of our destiny.

Writing my book is one of these for me, so why am I resisting it? I am in what writer Seth Godin calls “The Dip” — that challenging middle when we’ve accelerated and completed a good deal of our project, get some of the thrilling beginning out of the way, and now just need to plod along for a while, do the work, and see it through.

I am committed to completing a dozen pages and returning to the habit of writing regularly.

And I’m going to address these questions to remind myself why I’m doing this:

• Why do I feel called to write this book?

• Why does it matter to me?

• What will I gain when I complete this, and what is the gift to the world?

• What will I lose if I don’t keep this promise to myself and others?

• How will it feel to complete this book and publish it?

I want to practice the celebratory feeling of having completed a book. I know I will do it. I will make it happen. I feel called to do this and am committed to completing it. I believe in my dream because you either live your dream or you don’t.