I was watching the third episode of ER today, and one of the patients was singing a song called Time Flies. I checked out the lyrics… I don’t really get them… but this line stuck with me.
“… While we are dreaming, time flies…”
I’m sitting in my apartment in Bulgaria, wearing the sweater that a lovely lady knitted for me, FOR ME, from yarn that she spun herself, by hand, from her own goats (.. I’ve MILKED a goat… but not THE goat who was “involved” in making my sweater…. ), and I’m thinking that I absolutely agree with that phrase.
Time IS flying while we sit and dream of doing something.
The “dreaming” is important: without it, we would not know the destination, the target.
The “sitting” is important: without it, we would not devise an itinerary, a plan.
But both those are just parts of the whole. also important is the part that comes after the dreaming and the sitting, the part that is doing it, living it. It is by far the scariest part of the whole affair, the hardest, the costliest, but I would say also the most rewarding. And often, rewarding in ways we did not anticipate.
We are grown-ups and no one will tell us that to do. We are free to wile away our time, focusing on the dreaming…. it is safe, and it costs nothing but time, although it might lead to a feeling of dissatisfaction with our lives and our selves, knowing we dream of being more than we are, but we are not doing anything about it. We are also free to focus on the sitting, which has its own danger in that it allows us to feel like we are doing something useful, we are making lists, devising plans, we are pondering options.
The question I am asking myself is whether we have a responsibility to act. Are these dreams, in fact, the hand of Fate pointing out something more that we could be, something more we are intended to be – but since we have free will, the path is only shown to us, we are not led down it.
….
I’m sitting in my apartment in Bulgaria, wearing the sweater that a lovely lady knitted for me, FOR ME.
