What is your dream?

What is your dream?

We all have something. I have many dreams. Sometimes I think I have too many dreams to even keep track of them.

Many of us give up on our dreams because they’re not “realisitic” or “practical.” So we choose a path that doesn’t interest us in the slightest for the promised security.

And then we live our lives once and die. The one opportunity we had to chase a pipe dream is gone and we squandered our life away, losing our only opportunity to do what we’d like.

What’s the use in that? What’s the point of living our lives if we’re not going to do what we’d like?

I think that chasing a dream is much like running a marathon. You have to prepare beforehand physically as well as mentally. You must have a goal in mind, some sort of vision, that drives you forward. For months, or maybe even years, your mind fills with doubts and worries.

“Who are YOU to think you can actually do this? What if people laugh at you? You are not good enough to succeed. Stick to the mediocre. If you fail, you’ll lose everything.”

And sometimes we give into these thoughts. We stop training for the marathon because the preparation has already winded us.

But, we fail to realize that these thoughts are only part of the overall process. The only way to actually start running the marathon is to push back against all the forces that are holding you in place.

If we think about this from a physics standpoint, an object at rest has two forces acting on it. There is the force of gravity, keeping us grounded, and the normal force that is pushing back up against gravity. With only two forces on us, we stay in a constant state of equilibrium.

But if we stay in place, we cannot move forward. In order to move closer towards our goals, we must find the energy to start. This is what the training is for. We muster the courage to take our few first steps forward, and before we know it, there is another force that is pushing us backwards. Let’s call this friction.

With friction comes this negative internal dialogue that is telling us we are bound to fail. It’s attempting to keep us in place. It tells us that we cannot do it. Sometimes we give into the force of friction and return to our sedentary state.

But if we keep going forward, despite the opposing force, our force going forward becomes stronger than the force holding us back.

While an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, an object in motion stays in motion. We move forward and become “passengers of our own momentum” (quoted from an Uber driver I had in Cape Town). We let the momentum carry us forward towards our imagined future accomplishments.

Maybe other forces will try to oppose the momentum you’ve garnered. They could be doubts or insecurities that have come to surface, or they could be outside forces (such as friends or family members) who try to get you to stop. But, these forces are only trying to get you to return to a state of equilibrium. If you accelerate too quickly, people will start to become uncomfortable and encourage you to stop, but this discomfort is normal.

All we can do is push back against the discomfort.

And when we’re ready, we start the marathon. The journey has only just begun. Sometimes we don’t know where the marathon is going to end up. Maybe we thought we’d go in one direction, but end up changing our minds along the way. Maybe we didn’t read the instructions carefully enough and go somewhere that we weren’t completely prepared for.

The first few miles seem okay. We’re energized and ready to go. But as time goes on, our minds and bodies may start to fight back. Maybe our feet start bleeding and our backs start to hurt. Our legs tighten up and our breathing gets shallow. We want to give up at points.

We watch the people around us to see how they’re doing in the race, but their journeys are different from our own. We cannot compare the two because running a marathon is less about beating other people and more so about proving to yourself that you can finish it.

It doesn’t matter if they’re faster or slower than you because their path is different from your own. Their goals and dreams for the future are different. Their tradjectory is not the same.

So you push on and try to ignore everything else going on around you. These only serve as distractions from our own personal goals.

Certain points are a breeze. We run downhill and let the force of gravity help us along the way. But the race is not all downhill. There are some steep inclines that slow down our momentum. Sometimes these hills feel impossible.

After running for so long, we start to lose track of time. It feels like we’ve been running forever, but somehow also no time at all. The end of the race feels so far away.

By the time we finish, we feel this sense of satisfaction and pride like no other. Something that once seemed impossible is already a moment of the past. The next marathon around will be a bit easier.

Life is about deciding which marathon you want to run. Where do you want to go? What is your dream? We only have so much time, so when are you going to start training?