photo by per ola wilberg
the 5am question
nothing like waking up at 5am after a night of serious dreaming to get one thinking about what they would really love to be doing right about now. one being me. how about you? what do you really want to be doing right now?
and since i dive right into morning pages after pulling myself out of bed and making my way to the couch, i had plenty of white space to ponder that question. it quickly morphed into the recapitulation of a project i set up a couple years ago and then abandoned, bad father to my ideas that i sometimes am! this was the idea of the dream calendar, idea being that i would have a separate calendar in which i would create appointments for my dream life.
dream calendar 1.0
the challenge for dream calendar 1.0 was that it was based on grandiosity. i filled it with trips to costa rica and india, days spent doing yoga on the beach or picking mangoes off the tree, warm from the sun. you know the kind that almost explode when you pull off the peel, they are so ripe?
well…there was a limit to how long i was going to keep that thing up because it was really too far fetched. it was like the perpetual holiday calendar. where to now? and i couldn’t really sink my teeth into it (the calendar, not the mango…although when they are really ripe and warm from the sun it’s hard to sink your teeth into them either…they just sort of melt in your mouth, and all over your face, hands, arms, et cetera).
- too alien from my regular life, like imagining life on mars: fun project for a song or a novel, way to much for day to day life.
- too much of a leap from my current life, like going from rags to riches literally over night.
what i needed was some sort of a buffer between my life as it was (is) and the alien leap of my uber dreamlife.
change is inevitable
well since that time my life has changed considerably. i’ve gone from staying up ’til 2 to waking up at 5, from working mostly nights to working mostly days, from hard physical work mostly tangential to my real interests in life to work that is line up within ten to fifteen degrees of my current true north. i’ve also gone from a life full of free time to a life full of things to do (april 15 is looming!), a life in which i didn’t really need a calendar to a life in which i wouldn’t know what to do without one!
one thing that is obvious in the extreme is that change is inevitable. life does not stand still! the real question isn’t whether we’ll get change or not, it’s what kind of change we are going to get. change that warrants a spring in the step, a whistle on the lips? or change that feels like a kick in the ass, eliciting moans and groans and worse!
dream calendar 2.0
this is where dream calendar 2.0 comes in. older and wiser (ha!), clear of the need to manage my time (life with the boy requires time, money, and forethought!), recognizing that change is inevitable, and that unguided it will guide me, i can now see a few qualities that are necesary to make this calendar a useful tool in my quest to create the optimal lifestyle.
- be realistic! dreams need to be grounded in daily reality in order to have a chance of coming true.
- look at scale! something achievable in six months might be a good thing to put on todays dream calendar.
- incorporate the mundane! pre-school drop-offs, grocery shopping, garbage day reminders…whatever.
- spice it up! throw in that trip to mango-land…during school vacation perhaps?
- update on a regular basis! as the weeks and months go by, make sure your dreams are up to date!
so right off the bat i can fill in school drop off, time for working in the garden and doing shiva nata, an achievable work shedule that requires a mental stretch, plenty of time off for the cape and beyond this summer.
a week of dreaming big
so this is the little project of my week. create my dream calendar 2.0. i’ll keep you updated. feel free to do the same!
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