Today is my birthday

It's my birthday today. Today's the day to pick one goal, write it down and then commit to do whatever it takes to make my dreams come true. 


Lots of people have bucket lists of dreams that never come true. Or maybe they do, but my sense is that most people are like me. Lots of great ideas, but only so much energy and wherewithal.


I spoke with a personal coach recently, who asked, "What are your dreams?" Good question; obviously a good way for her to get a sense of who I am and what I want from life. I knew I had dreams ... somewhere ... but I have been too busy fighting with life to pay attention to them. I groped for an answer. "I want to write a book," I said. I wrote one in college, back in the days when they gave you credits for making yogurt. I convinced my English prof that I could write a novel, and I did. The first draft of a very embarrassing attempt in the 'sword and sorcery' genre about a man who found a sword that drank souls. (A vampire sword. Hmm. Maybe I should resurrect that).


I remember that it was a lot of fun, typing away on my mother's IBM Selectric. It had no correcting function and I was a rotten typist so I quickly ran out of correcting fluid. Fortunately, my story was a fantasy, so any time I misspelled something, I created a new word. It's a great exercise. Try it sometime. 


So after I nattered on a bit about how I put the book idea aside because I had decided that I needed life skills before I could really write anything that mattered, but hoped to do it one day, she stopped me. "When is that going to happen?" My first reaction was sardonic amusement. When indeed. Who am I kidding? But she stopped me again and said, "Really. When are you going to start?" She had me. I was feeling defensive. "I don't know, maybe when I retire?" She nodded slowly and asked,  "And when will that be?" 


The reality is that it's been thirty years since I wrote that first draft, and maybe another twenty until I retire. Do I really want to be the woman who let fifty years go by before she started making her dreams come true? Life moves pretty fast, according to Ferris Buehler. I decided that it was time to stop storing dreams and start acting on them. So today is the day that I will start with dream number one.