Today I saw an inspirational quotation. 'If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.' Give me a break. The whole problem was that now was never enough, sitting having dinner with a couple of broken people (one crotchety, one functionally absent) was not enough, doing the laundry and going to work and picking up the phone and staring at the kitten was not enough. Oh, no. We all deserve more. We all deserve to be special. We live in a world where we can all stand out. (Quite how that works I don't know: to stand out, a bunch of other people have to fail. Just make sure it's not you). And happiness happens when? Not now, not tomorrow, not even in ten years. Sacrifice the next ten years working and suffering, just on the off-chance that, you know, you might be happy, like all those successful people you know who are totally at peace in their big houses and on the TV. They never commit suicide or go into rehabs or have public arguments on Twitter. Oh, no, they're successful, their dreams have come true, and they now lived in a #blessed universe. Capiche?
OK, OK, if you want to be a radiographer, go and be a radiographer, and cut all that crap about 'not being good enough'. That's just something that people hear and then repeat it just for the pathos of it. The real fear is not that we won't be good enough but we won't be good enough to beat all the other scoundrels into the dust. The real fear is that we're just like other people: or-di-na-ry. Didn't like that word, much, did you? Or-di-na-ary. Roll the phrase round your mouth like a mint imperial. Get used to it. Bet everything is rebelling against that, now, isn't it?
'There must be another way.' Well, I should cocoa. If there isn't an alternative to Western Civilisation's obsession with achieving the impossible in some distant future to escape the existential anxiety of not being OK being here and now, we're all royally jiggered.
So, buster, what is it?
Well, try shooting for being present in a moment that is always OK (unless you're having your dislocated shoulder repositioned or an endoscope shoved down your throat via your nose, in which case you will probably need something to hold on). Once you're OK there, wherever you are, you can quietly get on with whatever you want, because, really, it does not matter any more. And you know what, you realise there's a satisfaction in doing well what is in front of you, just for the sake of it, even if no one is watching. Because, really, no one is watching. Even people who are watching are thinking only of themselves. You're just the mirror in which they're adjusting their mascara. Anyway: get on with that, and you'll probably discover, if you don't dissipate yourself across too many things like beekeeping and Korean calligraphy, that you do turn out to be quite good at something. Maybe it'll be making chairs. Maybe it'll be folding laundry. There's a Japanese woman who is A-MA-ZING at that. Check her out on YouTube. Maybe a dream will come true, after all. But it won't be your dream. It'll be something that looks like a dream to people who are really, really uncomfortable being alive.
And you're then happy, not because a dream has come true, but because the kitten is staring at you or the light on the brickwork outside is agreeable. Oh. It's gone.