Maya kept her dreams to herself. Secrets locked away, only to be studied in moments of great solitude. This didn’t stop her dreaming all day long. As long as no one interrupted her, Maya could daydream for hours.
Do you spend as much time fantasizing about a better life as you do living the one you’ve got? Do you while away dreamy hours imagining your perfect life? How does it look? How does it feel? Is it full of love and romance, wealth and abundance, pleasure, creativity and fulfilment? And how does it compare to your life right now? How big is the gap between your perfect life and your real life? And what are you doing to bridge it?
We all lose ourselves in fantasies from time to time. We even purposely focus on them in order to positively think our way towards our dreams. But, unchecked, these daydreams can do more harm than good. Because they can trick us into believing we’re taking steps towards a happier life, when really we’re doing nothing but staying stuck in limbo-land.
The mind is a sneaky thing. It’s clever and cunning and doesn’t always have our best interests at heart. Think of something you really want to do. Get fit, for example. So you research all the different forms of exercise, you spend hours on the internet, buy the best machines, you unpack the boxes, set up a mini-gym in a corner of your house and then… you never touch it again. Over the days and months it gathers dust, but you don’t remove or replace it, you keep it because just having it there makes you somehow believe that you’re doing something towards your goal.
So it is with fantasies. They keep us stuck with what we’ve got - when we spend so much time imagining a better life, we forget to take the practical steps towards creating one. So we dream about doing up our home, but content ourselves with looking at makeovers in magazines. We picture the day we win the Pulitzer Prize, but never pick up a pen. We imagine the wedding but never go out on the dates. We delight in dreams of doing a job we love, but never leave the one we hate.
These fantasies keep us warm at night. They keep us awake at our desks. They stop us from crying about what we don’t like in our lives. At least we think they do. Of course they don’t make us more alive, more vibrant, happy and joyful. Instead they keep us in a state of suspended animation. They stop us from taking real action to create a really wonderful life we wouldn’t want to escape from, mentally or otherwise.
The reason we fantasise about our lives rather than changing them is because we’re scared we can’t do the things we dream of, and we’re terrified of the disappointment we might feel if we try and fail. This way, we think, at least we won’t get hurt. But of course we are hurting, every single day. And the pain of never trying is a far worse pain, insidious and soul-destroying; it eats away at our sense of self, our power, our courage, and our residual belief that we can change our lives. Because, the longer we live in our dreams, the deeper we become aware of the difference between fantasy and reality. Until, ten years down the line, what was once a motivational picture in our minds, has become proof that change is impossible.
Perhaps it’s time to open your eyes, to stop fantasising and start living. Take a good look at your current reality. Imagine that it’s never going to change unless you do something to change it. Once you take away the half-light comfort of your daydreams you’ll be a lot clearer about what you want to do next. You won’t be able to put up with a badly behaving boyfriend anymore; you won’t endure the job you hate any longer. You will start taking action because you know that is the best way to make your dreams a reality.
How do you want your life to be? And how is it right now? Chances are there is a chasm between the two. But, instead of leaping across it in your dreams, you can begin to step across it in reality. Brick by brick you can build a bridge to the life you want. And, although it’ll take longer than a second, it probably won’t take as long as you fear it might. Indeed, it's this fear that causes you to get lost in fantasies in the first place: it's a quick fix, an instant hit. But, even if that bridge building takes years, in the end you will have transformed your life rather than still be dreaming about it. And what is more, you will have overcome your fears and taken steps forward, and discovered that simply having the courage to act feels amazing and - though you might not believe it now - better than any life you could fantasise about.
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