I had a dream. Not unusal at all for me. I sometimes think I am always dreaming. Sometimes I wake up and I just KNOW that the dream I was dreaming was important in some way. It has been this way since I was a child. I have had visions this way. I have had what I sometimes see as messages from the Dreamtime (and sometimes I just dream that the Doctor has dropped me home at Hogwarts after a trip to see the city of Atlantis in the Pegasus Galaxy and then I worry I've been watching too much TV...)
What I want to share with you from that dream was the realization, when I awoke, that my life is not stagnant and that I will not find the answers to my questions inside myself. My life is spark of light and I have to live it to see how it goes. I realized that I cannot write the story of my life and live it at the same time.
I was seventeen when my mother died. I learned something then. I learned what it means to sum up a life lived. I heard the stories of my mother's life and realized that someday people would be talking about my life the same way. I picked up a bad habit at that point. I started to try to live my life with an eye to how people would view me - when I died and in history. All those literature classes in college did not help. I had an internal editor working on my life the way it works on a writer's work. If a writer does not suspend the internal editor, she never gets anything written down. She questions every word, every line. I wanted to be a writer that got studied in colleges! I thought, "how cool would that be?" and I shifted my focus. The result has been devastating to my life and my work. Talk about putting pressure on yourself! Everything I did, I decided that I had to look toward the whole picture. So everytime I "wasted" a day playing a computer game or watching TV, I berated myself for not working on what I "should be" doing.
Ah, the dreaded "should be"...my nemesis. At this risk of sounding like Sheldon Cooper, it's my mortal enemy - the Khan to my Captain Kirk, if you will.
What it comes down to is expectations. I worry that I'm being arrogant when I say it, but it's true. I have great expectations for myself. I believe God has put me on this earth for a purpose. And, like Clark Kent, I don't think it's to kick footballs. I think I have a greater purpose.
But the truth is, I think everyone has a purpose. And, for each person, that purpose is a great one.
I read a book once called "Embraced by the Light" by Betty Eadie. I've thought of it often in the years since I've read it. Ms. Eadie claimed to have had a near-death experience where she went to heaven, was allowed to see and remember important parts, and return to tell everyone. Now, firstly I was point out that that in itself is a pretty great purpose. But, also, one of the things she reports when she returns is that souls get to meet each other in heaven before coming to Earth. And they agree to act in certain ways in each other's lives. It may be something that seems unimportant, like a smile or a gesture or some kind of "bumping into them" on one particular day. What I remember is that even that small interaction was deemed extremely important in Heaven. I've seen this in action in my own life. I'm sure you have as well. Sometimes we impact other people's lives without really comprehending how much of an impact we've made. We do it every day. Some interactions we're never going to realize were important until the day we die. Some interactions we learn years later made more of an impact than we knew at the time. I guess sometimes we begin a work in someone's life and sometimes we are the ones that help the person finish it.
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