One of the most common sayings I run across on almost a daily basis is, “Living the Dream!” and to be frank the phrase brings more questions to my mind than I am comfortable with. There’s no one dream that everyone wants to live so why is it “the”? My grandma says it best when she says “You’re living your dream”. Everyone has a dream land where they would rather spend the majority of their time and not one of those dreams overlaps totally with anyone else’s dream. I believe I speak for most when I say the dream is a place that is full of happiness, laughs, and heaps of fun, but the finer details vastly differ.

Step 1 to Living the Dream: TAKE THE PLUNGE
A saying that I remember as a child is “as long as your having fun.” There is no reason why this needs to stop when we become adults. There is no law that says we have to live in a certain place or do a certain job. Everyone in Canada could technically move to Whistler or Revelstoke and become ski bums, and there is nothing anyone at parliament could do. Take the plunge and go for it! I see more and more people leaving jobs they trained for years at college or university and pursuing passions. We owe it ourselves to see what the reality of those dream lands are like. The only scary part of your dream life is actually pursuing it.

Step 2 to Living the Dream: BUILDING A NEW COMMUNITY
The land of dreams is not always what you imagined, but in this plunge of opportunity you will quickly find a bunch of other people chasing a similar dream to you. When you meet these people it quickly makes you forget all the worries you had before you took this big risk. These people become your backbone of reassurance that you indeed are doing the right thing. Be prepared to start making professional contacts that will help find and sort a line of work in this new dream land. Once the money starts to flow you will be reassured again by people you work with and the customers of that business that you are indeed doing the right thing. Just roll with it cause the more people you meet the easier it gets and harder it gets to get out of your dream land.

Step 3 to Living the Dream: KEEPING IN TOUCH
This new life you are now living may or may not be in the same geographical location as your previous life, but with a new community it may become tougher to keep in touch with family and friends. The main way these connections are kept is by communicating mostly with people that are genuinely interested and stoked on your new life. The worst thing anyone can do is be constantly questioning the decisions you are making instead of just being happy for you. I think you’ll find this eliminates the people that were holding you back and allows those true friends and supportive family members to shine and for you guys to remain close. Thanks to the world wide web and international phone calls, you are never to far from anyone anymore.

Step 4 to Living the Dream: LIVE YOUR DREAM
The dream is an ever altering series of events and ideas floating in and out of your mind. It is necessary that we sit down once in a while and refocus on what the original dream was. Maybe the dream was just to move near the mountains and get out more. Once that that has been accomplished chuck a check mark beside that one and move to the next item. It will definitely not always be clear and because of this you will be thinking what the heck am I doing. You’re living your dream is what your doing and once you get out there you may realize you never thought through as many details as you thought you would encounter. The new community from step 2 and even old friends and family from step 3 can help remind you why you are there and the different options available to you in your dream land.

Living the dream is what were told to strive for as kids. Do whatever your mind can imagine. Let your mind wander and do the crazy things it tells you to do. I’m firm believer that we can do anything if we put our mind to it. All these people that we look up to and look at as “living the dream” are just ordinary people. There not superheros and certainly weren’t born with the skillset they possess. We learn by doing and by doing we learn to become better versions of ourselves. Living the dream is a mindset.

Posted by Mitch