WILDEST DREAMS - THE KEY THAT LIKELY UNLOCKS THE PATH TO HAPPINESS, TO REVEAL OUR LIFES' PURPOSE
For the longest time I can remember, I've struggled with this one question: what should I be when I grow up? Growing up in my hometown of Sibiu (in Transylvania, Romania), I was guided in one direction: my job was to study. Simple enough. What's more, there was never a question of what specifically I was meant to study. The answer was very simple, and it was the same for every kid I knew. It was two subjects - math, and language arts.
Everyone I knew worked their butts off to be good at these two subjects. I liked to read (for the longest time, I had a goal to read as many books as possible; when I was at the top of "my game", my goal was a book a month and I think I did it for about 6 months). So literature, or language studies, was something that seemed intuitive to me. Math was at first a subject I was intrigued by - mainly because there was always a known solution to every problem. Math was a puzzle that I sometimes couldn't figure out, but it was comforting to know that a solution was guaranteed to exist. There were several ways to go about to get to an answer, and, like Sherlock Holmes, I was often curious to figure it out.
When my grades started to slip in seventh grade, my mom, always the fighter, got me the best tutor in town, and slowly my grades started to pick up, until one day, about 4 years later, my math grades were the highest in my class. That was good news, because that meant I would be likely to get into college. In 11th grade was the time when I raised this question with my mom for the first time - what should I do when I grow up? Should I be a math teacher perhaps? To which my mom promptly replied something along the lines of "You don't make money as a math teacher and probably don't get to choose where you want to live either. You should go into business." Her reasoning made sense to me at the time, but times took interesting turns since then. That was 1988.
The interesting thing about the year 1988 is actually two things: one, that was the year before 1989, and two, that I was in Romania. Put the two together, and you get a cool combo - it's the last year of communism, the year before the revolution broke out and the iron curtain went down in flames. Everything changed from that point on: after college you could now do unbelievable things like cross the border and get a job into the outer space of Western Europe, and... the world! You could also apply for jobs on your own merits, and live wherever you pleased (my mother's generation had to go where they were allowed by the government's bureaucratic state system). None of us were prepared for... choices. Not just another choice, but a whole menu of them. But, as they say, I didn't know it at the time.
My first wild dream I can remember, was to leave home and get into the best college in the country. Not short of a miracle, gosh darn it, I got in. Next, my wildest dream by far, was to go to America. Not an easy thing, given that it was a dream shared by many I knew. Really - by most. One evening after work we went out for drinks - of Coca Cola, mind you, that's how behind times we were, at age 23 - a girl in my circle of friends was frank (those Eastern Europeans!) and nearly bursted my bubble of hope with questions like.. "Why do you think YOU could get a job in US? Doing what? Everyone is trying to get a job in US, including people who live there. What do you think makes you special?". All I could say was something like ... "You're probably right. But I still think I'll get to go".
My third wild dream, was to find MY man. While feeling lonely in New York city, with barely much to go on but always pushing to stay afloat, one day a beautiful thought occurred to me. The man that was to be my husband - you know, the one you're designated at, at birth, as I deeply believed - is somewhere out there. I was certain not only that he existed, but that he was also looking for me. That made two of us, so I figured we had a chance.
As I was walking one evening back from work, headed to my little studio in the Dominican Harlem (142nd St in NYC), I would envision this gorgeous man, who I would get to marry one day. And when that happened, I would tell him how I was thinking about him before I met him, and then I would ask him what he was doing at that specific time, November 1998. Where was he? Well - through an incredible chain of people and circumstances that certainly were filled with real magic, I indeed got to meet my man four months after that night. Nine months after we met, we were married at City Hall and opened a bottle of Champagne on Brooklyn Bridge.#luckyme
But the wild dreams didn't stop there. I dreamed to become a mom, to take a year off to go to Europe and homeschool our kids. But the craziest dream of them all is to write a book. To delight my fingers while typing my good old stories, and other people's, shared with me during interviews in the past five months.
From the 20 people I interviewed so far, I learned, and for some reason was surprised by this, that nearly no one knew what they wanted to become when they grew up (with only about two exceptions, one a musician, another, a doctor). Almost everyone said they followed a road that lead to another road which they took, and so on. And here is a truth I found: those who are happiest, did two things. They dared to have a wild dream, and, just as important, they acted on it. They envisioned a wild dream at some point, and launched after it. Like you would jump in the waves of a beautiful, promising sea, to perhaps catch a wave and... float. You know you have little chance to catch that wave, but what the heck, you're on this beach, and you might as well jump. Why you? What makes YOU so special to dream that you might catch it? Here is why - because all those people on the beach, asking you this question, are not even trying. But you are dreaming it, and you jump into that sea because you're curious. And, as it happens, eventually it's YOU who gets to ride that wave.
#dreams #happy
