Blog 196 – 12.30.15

Whose life is it anyway? Billy Joel sang, “This is my life. Go ahead with your own life and leave me alone?” We have all at one time or another bristled at someone trying to tell us how to live our own life. Parents, girlfriend or boyfriend, husband or wife, siblings, why, if you live long enough even your children will try to tell you how to live your life. I think a lot of the unhappiness in life is caused by not living life to the fullest. You are a unique and magnificent being and the one size fits all or trying to live someone else’s dream is like trying to force a bird to walk. You were meant to spread your wings and fly.

Parents and teachers are the biggest culprits in trying to force their dreams on us. Often it is their dream that they didn’t have the courage to go after themselves. Oh, yeah, they married young and had responsibilities. Somebody had to stay home and look after Mom. Excuses – we chose our pathway, life doesn’t happen to us, we create the world we live in by our thoughts, by our words, and by our reactions. I say reactions instead of actions because most often it is our reaction to circumstances/opportunities that decide the direction our life will take.

If we learn to look at everything that comes to us as a present, an opportunity, a gift from God/the Universe we would quickly see our lives change for the better. I recently saw the movie Dead Poet Society again and was thrilled again as an English Literature professor taught young men to Carpe Diem, seize the day. The story takes place in the nineteen fifties at a boy’s college preparatory school. It is a live away from home school and most of the boy’s parents are not financially-challenged if perhaps a bit attention and affection-challenged. One boy is remarking to a buddy that he just received the same desk set he got from his parents the year before at Christmas. The buddy, trying to cheer him up says, “Well, at least you know what you’re going to get next Christmas. Hey, that desk set looks like it could fly.” So the young man sails it out into the night where you hear it crash and both boys smile.”

The main story line in the movie revolves around a boy whose dad wants him to be a doctor. The boy wants to be an actor and ends up killing himself rather than live a life not his own choice. Tragic as that story is the reason countless people live lives of quiet desperation is that they are trying to live someone else’s dream. From the time I was a boy my dream has been to be a writer, a speaker, a singer/song writer. I allowed circumstances and other people’s dreams to sidetrack me for most of my life. I have had a wonderful life with lots of experiences that give me so much to write about but as my Dad told me about his military experience in World War II, “I would not take a million dollars for the experience but also would not go through it again for ten million.”

I joined the Army right out of high school, at the height of the Vietnam War, so I would be able to go to college and study writing on the G.I. Bill after my enlistment. Needless to say I let other things, others dreams, lure me away from my own dream life. Fifty years later I am back on track and watching the dream of a lifetime come true. How about you? No more excuses. Go for it. Whose life is it anyway?

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White