Realising your dreams

And recalibrating to your new reality

I have just realised a life goal of mine!

I’ve been following them in some form or another for the last ten years, reading their articles, listening to their podcasts, participating in their challenges. Their content has been a profound source of support, inspiration and guidance to me through some of the most difficult moments in my life. And I have idolised many of the people running it, seeing them as spiritual celebrities, as people operating on another plain of productivity, wellbeing and wisdom.

And now I have found myself rubbing shoulders with them, working with them, being asked for my thoughts and insights.

Cue scenes of jubilation and merriment, bugle-blaring and glass-clinking, little scrummy moments of foot-stamping, fist-scrunching, eye-fluttering ecstasy.

Or not.

Rather, I have found myself both under- and overwhelmed:

Underwhelmed in terms of how good I have actually felt, encountering more a sense of emptiness where joy should be.

And overwhelmed by the pressure I feel myself to be under: exposed beneath the ambient glare of these uber-menschen I hold in such high esteem, and terrified by the responsibility of overseeing the social media content for their hundreds of thousands of followers.

If I could have told myself ten years ago — totally adrift in the sea of life, buffeted randomly between the impetuses of desire and flitting glimpses of meaning — that I would be doing this, I would have found it hard to believe. And I would have taken it for granted that in such a situation I would be extremely happy.

And yet I am not.

Why?

Firstly, the process by which we attain our goals is not usually a dramatic step-change from a previous stage of life. We do not usually go from dream to reality in one leap. (Though it is possible).

Rather, our journey towards our dream is marked by endless imperceptible steps, many of them not even consciously in the direction of where we have ended up. We build our character through a million tiny acts and experiences and they accumulate to form the type of person who is able to take on the types of opportunities we have striven towards.

The problem, of course, is that we therefore arrive without the dramatic fanfare we envisage in our dreams. As Eric, one of the High Existence team, said to me the other day, it is like the positive version of the frog boiling in water effect. That is, the temperature rises so gradually that the frog never realises it is being boiled. Similarly, our goal manifests around us in subtle gradations, until we find ourselves ensconced in a new reality, with no individual moment announcing itself as the achievement itself: ‘Goal achieved nnnnnnow!’.

In an important sense, this is a good thing. In the case of a dream job certainly, incremental progress is essential so that we have gained the skills needed to meet the challenge. Still, showing up is very different to enjoying and appreciating our achievements.

Secondly, dreams are, of course, illusions. Beautiful illusions, but illusions nonetheless. They are an idealised version of reality, where the desirable is shorn of the undesirable. In a dream, I am able to exist in an unadulterated state of positivity, with none of the attendant responsibilities, nourishing-but-demanding relationships, and countless other little complications we have to navigate in the real world.

In my head, realising this dream meant floating on thin air. Because I was not imagining myself feeling anxious and under pressure. I was not imagining myself having to sacrifice other projects I wanted to spend my time on. I was not remembering the necessity of learning new skills and inhabiting the uncomfortable space of being a beginner again.

This means that achieving the dream does not just fall short of our expectations. It can in fact feel positively negative (sic.). Held against the harsh light of our idealised vision, the realisation of the goal is actually experienced as a lack, an absence of what should be.

Does this mean that all achievements are dangerous mirages we dangle, Sisyuphus-like, before ourselves?

Put another way: is my current emotional state of stress and ingratitude inevitable?

Of course not.

We simply have to be aware of our tendency to idealise reality and forget the journey that we have undergone to get us to where we are.

Without this awareness, the quest towards realising our goals really does just become a meaningless, depressing treadmill, a masochistic self-imposed state of endlessly craving arrival, when in fact we never arrive.

What this has meant for me is taking stock.

Firstly, practising gratitude is essential. In a world of endless endorphin-flooding, it can be difficult for some of us to really feel into the good fortune we experience in endless ways in life, from the big to the small.

I will be reminding myself of this particular piece of good fortune repeatedly, recording it in my journal, and feeling into the perspective of that 21-year-old who could barely have dreamt of this state of affairs.

(The vaguely utilitarian notion of gratitude practice can seem depressing to some. But if this capacity for gratitude has become numbed in us, I prefer to think it is fortunate that a method exists to re-access this feeling.)

I will also simply be reminding myself that there was never any point in attaining this goal if I am not going to enjoy it now that I have.

If I find myself pushing ceaselessly through anxiety and stress in order to meet the standards I am imposing on myself, I will stop.

Because the dream was never plainly to achieve something.

It was to be happy as a result of whatever I achieved.

(While it is perilous to pursue happiness in and of itself, if we do not aim to appreciate the milestones we reach over our lives, we cannot expect to experience it.)

All of this requires taking a step back. Drawing breath. Smelling the roses. Placing all of this in its proper context and remembering that though fear shouts the loudest, we do not have to listen.

In all honesty, just writing this article has been cathartic, codifying how insanely lucky I am to be living this dream, bringing my new reality into focus. It has nudged my mind into the direction that I want it to go in, rather than allowing me to be dragged around by whatever moody impulses it has adopted for the day.

I do, in fact, feel better already.

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