They say you should never start a story off with a dream; well screw it, because this dream mattered, and this is more of a journalistic essay anyway.
I had a dream that I died. I’m not sure how I died. Actually, I just remember seeing myself lying dormant in bed. Perhaps that means I went peacefully in my sleep.
But this wasn’t a dream where I went to Heaven and met God or was damned to Hell. This was one of those dreams where I floated above myself, reflecting on life after I had gone.
From my aerial viewpoint, instead of feeling sorry for my wife who was devastated, or focusing on my mother crying about her loss, I turned my gaze toward myself, the empty shell that could no longer do what he set out to do. That’s really what it was—a shell, a body with no soul attached, no lifeform to guide.
In this dream, I had a book that was never finished. All I could think was, “If I would have just stopped procrastinating...”
I also noticed my wife was still living in our apartment. I thought, “I never bought us our first house.”
My last thought was, “There’s so much I haven’t done, so many experiences I missed out on, so many stories I never told. I never went glamping with my wife, or to the Harry Potter AirBnB we talked about. I never traveled to Europe like my brother Steve, or heard Twenty One Pilots in concert.”
My ruminations, while perhaps a bit selfish, focused on three things: career, responsibility, and adventure.
You would think the main takeaway would be to become a go-getter, to seek out a mindset and desire that pushes me to pursue those goals. But if I’m being honest, my conclusion when I awoke was this: I’ll never break away from the addiction of comfortability, the lie of happiness I find within deferring goals to a later day.
No, the admittedly sad reality of the matter is that my main takeaway from this dream is that I won’t realize the depth of loss until it’s too late. I won’t fathom the great hole in my heart of missing the mark until the clock of my life has made its last tick. I will never be who I set out to be, never learn from my own dream of warning.
There’s a sense of urgency in our lives to accomplish milestones within these three tiers, and yet they are also the easiest things to push off at times. The sick truth of it all is that we hold ourselves up to a false mirror, seeing a reflection of who we want to be instead of who we are.
No matter the accolades I reach, no matter the amount of books I write, the house I buy, or the adventures I embark on, I will never look in that mirror and be satisfied. The dream will always haunt me of the things I never did; the dream will always haunt me of the person I could’ve been; the dream will always haunt of me of what perfection would be in the flawed life I live.
But perhaps this takeaway, while being a self-loathing form of diffidence, can potentially lead to a diametric response.
While I may not become the best form of myself, and I may never reach every milestone I set out to achieve in this life, who is to say we must hold ourselves to this ideology? What if my response is to change my perspective completely?
If life has taught me anything, it is the fact that I can never find contentment in myself. Every achievement I’ve reached in the past has only led to a fleeting joy, there for a season, gone in the next.
What if this standard, this unattainable bar of self-satisfaction, was flipped on its head? What if the problem is not the lack of desire we have for our goals, but the desire itself, the belief that this is where our happiness lies?
If this be true, it removes the pressure the burns the hole in my heart in the first place. It removes the mentality that I can never be the version of myself I want to be.
I believe this is the mark so many of us miss—we turn to self-help books, podcasts, and progressive movements that are supposed to help us achieve self-actualization. But is the race for gratification being sought in the wrong place?
It is a works-based salvation, a belief that, “If I could just be good enough, then I will be happy.”
But I now come to the conclusion that this outlook is flawed. Reaching for a pedestal that only continues to become out of reach will get me nowhere. Well, in a sense, yes, it will get me somewhere. I’ll find myself holding more trophies if I allow a goal-oriented mentality to take root. But in the end, it won’t lead to the purposeful happiness, a fulfilling joy, that we all desire. Instead, I’ll only find myself in an endless cycle, running on a hamster wheel, chasing the unattainable.
This isn’t to say I shouldn’t pursue my goals; it’s the principle that changes. I won’t be reaching in order to satisfy. Instead, my satisfaction shall be fueled elsewhere, leading to achieving in light of my joy instead of for my joy.
As Lightning McQueen says when reflecting on Doc Hudson’s words: “At the end of the day, it’s just an empty cup.”
-Michael Jaymes
Romans 14:7-8
For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.