I'm becoming a big collector of quotes. Note: I'm not a hoarder. A few days ago, I ran across these words from Hemingway, "When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead." Taking this thought with a grain of salt in the form of his long-running alcoholism and eventual suicide, Hemingway has a point. Life is nothing if you don't enjoy it. Fight Club author, Chuck Palahnuik mirrored the sentiment when he wrote in Invisible Monsters: "All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring." God or not, they are boring people among us, living and barely breathing. The boring are the zombies. They are dead inside. How can they fail to see the juice of life dripping right in front of their lips? Blind and deaf, Helen Keller would have kicked their asses. She wrote, "Life is either daring adventure or nothing at all."
Can we all sit at the table and agree that life should not be boring? OK. Good.
Because we're more than animals and instincts, we're given the opportunity to reason and explain ourselves. Who are we? What should we do? They're not far off from the questions I'm sure we all ask ourselves when we wake up Monday morning. What animals attempt to do is survive. If that means they have to migrate or murder, they do it. What humans have is some kind of infection to move forward. We're pushed further into space, conquering the world in front of us. We've created pyramids and the Sears Tower, pocket-sized devices to communicate over masses of water instantaneously, and explanations for why orbiting masses are no good for us to live on. I'm no philosophy buff, but my thought is we're trying to see how close we can be to becoming God. We adapt and master our environments. While we cry global warming and worldwide war, we forget how we've grown to seven billion, obliterated illnesses and made food vastly easier to create. We develop and destroy, and in the meantime we each inch toward greatness. Or at least that was my thought last week.
Personal development can be corny. There is no doubt in my mind. My immediate understanding is that we're so conditioned to be mesmerized by the boredom-killing machines around us that shooting for the stars becomes relegated to high school graduation speeches and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. We see visible goal-setting as a sign of weakness because dreamers are actively trying to design a life and not allowing it to flow. In a way, it seems uncool to care about life? I could be wrong, but I know people scoff. Last summer, my interest in personal development gave me the focus and motivation to take a cross-country roadtrip and eventually propose my promotion as a recycling coordinator. That's enough for me to smile.
We're nothing without one another. I want you to know and I want to know you. What are your big, scary dreams? What are your sexiest nightmares? Take some time, put some extra thought into it this morning or evening and hit me with some knowledge. We can start a conversation to look back on and make us happy we started this journey.When we start talking about our life, it becomes real. We are our thoughts after all. Hell, your dreams are nothing if you don't wake up and share them. Chances are you dreams involve the world anyway.
If you're still unsure about motivational speaking or sharing some serious thoughts or just dreaming too big, I'll leave you with the brilliant words of one of my favorite writers, Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."