I’m still involved in Diane Gilman’s book Good Jeans. I usually fly through books, but with this one I forced myself to slow down, digest, and savor. By savor I mean the book inspires me, which in turn makes me happy, and I want the smoke of inspiration to last. I don’t want it to be over.
I’m nearing the end and found the best parts of the book are the end and the beginning. I know this by my highlights. I highlighted a lot of parts in the beginning and even more in the last chapters. The part that hit me today was on dreams.
Dare to dream. Not only at 60, but your whole life. I always was a dreamer, spending many hours up in my bedroom throughout my teen years, rocking in my rocking chair, visualizing how my life was going to play out. Diane said something about dreams that really resonated with me. She said the partner to dreaming is entitlement. Not meant in the negative, self-serving way we might think, but the idea, for most successful people, that they won’t accomplish what they set out to do, never occurs to them.
And once you start with your first dream, that one works its way into another dream, and another,as they continue to build, expand, and wrap around one another.
I now realize that when I tell people I knew I wanted to be a fourth grade teacher at age nine, and wanted to marry my husband at age twelve, and wanted to go to college and come back to teach in the school I grew up in, and have a certain kind of wedding, and have two girls, which later lead to deciding I wanted to retire on Cape Cod and become a writer…people just shake their heads and say how did you know all that? I didn’t. I always dreamed and it never once, not even once, occurred to me that my dreams weren’t going to come true. Each dream intertwined with the others, until voila! – here I am today with everything I set out to accomplish, even though the odds were against me much of the time.
I used to look back and marvel at the wonder of it all, thinking how lucky I was. Now, I recognize from reading Diane’s book, luck didn’t have anything to do with it. It just never occurred to me I wouldn’t get what I wanted at each stage of my life, dream after dream. I always dreamed, visualized, made a plan, and possessed that sense of entitlement where it never, ever occurred to me these dreams weren’t going to come true. When I said I was going to do something, I did it, regardless of roadblocks. Roadblocks never deterred me from keeping on, keeping on. I’m the child who wanted things other kids had, but we couldn’t afford it. That never stopped me. I just figured out a way to make them, using whatever I had. I did the same thing with my dreams.
This is a fabulous book, even if you’re not sixty or near retirement. Read it. Then start dreaming. Start visualizing. Start planning. And don’t ever let it occur to you that it isn’t going to happen. Everyone deserves to dream at every age, so let’s get to it. What’s your dream at your particular stage of life?
And so, as another day goes by, don’t ever let it occur to you that your dream isn’t going to come true is a solid gem of wisdom/advice, and…I have written.
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