Living the Dream

It's a phrase that gets used a lot these days.  I guess that when I was growing up, 'Living the Dream' wasn't anything that anybody did or said.  Things just happened to you.  I grew up with kids who dreamed of being football players, air hostesses, racing car drivers and movie actresses.  They turned out to be bank clerks, teachers, social workers and secretaries.  I'm not sure whether they gave up their dreams and cashed in their diplomas for a steady job, or whether they're still out there somewhere, still hoping to make it.

As for the girl that I was, she wrapped her dreams up in tissue paper with the other bits and pieces in her Hope Chest.  It was a lovely shiny dream of being some amazing performer and singer and it seemed such a shame.  The Hope Chest also included a short neatly written note to her teenage self, penned at a time of really deep despair when she thought that nothing would ever come out right.  It was written in the form of a vow, never to give up and to one day be confident enough to stand up on a stage in front of hundreds and hundreds of people (seemed a lot then), play guitar and sing.

I made decisions that I don't regret, met someone really nice and have had the time of my life raising a family and taking far more delight than I ever imagined in the ordinary but magical process of watching my children grow around me.

I've sung in front of a good few people since, but I've also pulled the tissue paper of that dream and contemplated it for a while.  True, it looked very nice and ornamental arranged with the perfume bottles on my dressing table but I think the time might have come to do something more about it. I've already started in fact. Along the way I kinda discovered that smaller audiences are way scarier to perform to than the hundreds I'd imagined. That nice shiny dream has got an awful lot battered, rough edged and reshaped in the process but it's still intact and really that's what matters. 

So, since you're reading this, what's your dream?