When you reach back, in the days of your youth - when you remember the past, what were your child-self's dreams made of?
I'm not referring to the typical school questions: What would you like to be when you grow up? What are your ambitions? Your "dreams" to be a nurse, fire fighter, teacher, pilot, were those really your dreams or what you were told dreams should be?
Isn't it strange to frame career choices as dreams? Especially now when we are told our generation will likely have a minimum of five jobs and three career changes, in comparison to our parents' 40 year career in the same company.
A career is a career - it should hopefully be fulfilling and challenging, and something that doesn't bore you to tears or that you detest down to your bone marrow - but it isn't a dream. It usually is however, a stepping stone to a dream.
Do you remember what your dreams were?
Or have they been subsumed in the dreary everyday chores of existing, buried under too much work, or under countless disappointments and little hurts.
Without our dreams, our lives are often directionless or lived reactively, instead of with intention.
By that I mean we bounce from crisis to crisis, and challenge to challenge, often losing sight of where we wished to go in the first place. We get too busy being busy, and that is a vicious cycle without end. We often sacrifice our health chasing wealth, and then spend all of our wealth in a desperate effort to regain our health. We get subsumed in the needs of our children, our parents, our dependents and lose sight of who we are.
Sometimes we may think life is meaningless.
Sometimes we realise this halfway through aging and go through a mid-life crisis.
All those wasted years, forgetting who we are.
Time is the one thing we can never get back, so if you look back on your years of living, do you have any regrets?
There's still time to do something about it. It isn't too late. Shouldn't you take some time to remember you, your hopes, your dreams, and your identity?
Remember your dreams.
And from there, start thinking about how to reach them once again, with a child's hope, and an adult's plans.
