Do not settle!

Have you ever had that feeling of standing still while everything around you moves quickly? That is pretty much what this time of year does to me, with all of the end of school year activities and getting the kids ready for new summer adventures, I sometimes feel like I am observing instead of participating. That thought put me on a trajectory today of why am I so complacent to stand still. For me it comes down to playing and replaying my own HIStory again and again. It is quite less scary to sit back and observe than it is to actually participate and I have gotten good at it throughout the years. The problem is I am too good at it now, I can give you reason after reason of why my ideas wont work, I certainly don’t need to wait for you to tell me that, so lets just play safe and pretend that my traditional job and career is enough to ask for and not embarrass myself by getting in the game…NO!!! That my readers is settling and I have an honorary doctorate in that, my wife , my kids and more importantly myself, deserve more. It’s funny how much courage it takes to act on an idea and how easily we will dismiss it at the first sign of a perceived obstacle. Whats even more amazing is in all this self-doubt and dream paralysis there is a lesson to teach my kids. Dreams belong to each of us and no one else, therefore no one can destroy it without first our permission. I am profoundly telling the world that I will not settle, I am telling my kids that same thing too for them. The fact that any of us lacks anything we feel we need to reach our dreams is what keeps us from trying in the first place. The real truth is that you don’t have to be a rock star to be a musician, you don’t need to have a book deal to be a writer, ultimately we are (or become) who we say we are over and over every day every time those feelings of settling and standing still push forward. I may not be as good as I want to be today but I will not let that stop me from being even better tomorrow. In the words of the poet Dylan Thomas ” Do not go gentle into that good night, rage , rage against the dying of the light” Damn right.