What are you going to be when you grow up?

Edan wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: i wish i could shake those people and tell them "YOU DONT HAVE TIME TO WASTE!! YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!! IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU LOVE, DO IT, GO DO IT NOW!!"

Unfortunately, not all of us have to means to just 'go do it' :dry:

i dont know what your "thing" is so i cant say much, maybe you want to fly helicopters or race speedboats or balloon around the globe

for me, those years i mentioned that i wasted the excuse was always because i didnt have the resources
but
truth be told
i could have found a way to do more than i did

all i know is that the walls get smaller and smaller every year that goes by
and one day theyll be so small that it really is too late, and all the excuses and all the distractions become bitter and empty regrets
because we knew the whole time what we should have been doing but we didnt do it

i hope you can find a way

OB1Shinobi wrote: i wish i could shake those people and tell them "YOU DONT HAVE TIME TO WASTE!! YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!! IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU LOVE, DO IT, GO DO IT NOW!!"

ive always known that i love martial arts, whether i can really fight or not, whether im in good shape or not, ive always had a passion for training, but there have been SO MANY years that ive allowed to go by NOT in a gym or a dojo, training. I regret every single year, every month and every week that i wasnt doing what i loved. It never gets easier than it is right now, ever. Do it now and maybe one day youll be amazing at it: DONT do it now and youre just wasting another day

do you want to be the old lady who wishes she could play the drums or the old lady who jumps on a set and rocks it out??

i wanna rock that shit!

Most people have more dreams than they have life to dedicate to them. If you spend your whole life doing one thing you love, there's 100 other things you love/might have loved that you missed out on.

In that sense, any time doing something you love is well spent. Any time. Anything. If you spent your time taking care of your family, taking care of yourself, doing things you enjoy but that aren't big ticket dreams? That time wasn't wasted. And until you die there's still time ahead of you.

Maybe we don't have time to waste, but we do have time.

JamesSand wrote: Tsst.

Heheh.

All I want to be is "not what I was"

Not exactly "carpe diem", but we can't all live glorious lives.

Depends on your definition of 'glorious'.... I find every day 'glorious' for myself, lol... Even the 'bad' days, lol...

"Contentment' comes into play here, big time,lol...

When ask "what do you want to be when you grow up, my answer was "happy"... When they clarified the answer, as grownups often do, they said, "no, what do you want to do with your life for a job/occupation", which is how many define their life...

"What do you want to do to occupy your adult life?" I thought, "'be happy' isnt an appropriate answer?"

I said "eh, my mom works at a bank as a teller, I'll do that"...

I am and have been doing what I wanted to do my whole life.

I train and teach martial arts. Specifically BJJ, though I am obsessed and dabble in most grappling arts

Most people have more dreams than they have life to dedicate to them. If you spend your whole life doing one thing you love, there's 100 other things you love/might have loved that you missed out on.

Anything you plan on doing with any depth of study will require a sacrifice. Be it of time, sweat, blood, and tears, ( especially in my case) injuries, time away from family, money.

I find people have so many "dreams" that it paralyzes them because you cannot do them all.

Really though, I find they dont want to do all of them, but they have not even tried to weed those out either.

Things like this are not a case of ready, aim, fire, but ready, fire, aim.

Maybe we don't have time to waste, but we do have time.

Hmm, well, I work in a profession where death is a regular occurrence. It comes regardless of age, race, or lifestyle.

The thing is, you do have time, but no one knows how much, and so, you you cannot in any way assume you do in fact have time, or at least as much as is required to do what you want with your life.

The time ahead of you, may be much, much shorter than you think, and I have been in the presence of too many who have regretted not doing more while they had time. Death has a way of making all those dreams suddenly coalesce into one, or two.Some manage to fit time enough for some things in, some, do not, and not only is there the common fears and stresses of dying to contend with, but also the crushing regret of not doing more with the time they had. Or even anything at all.

Heres and piece from a book I think makes some points on this...

Several years ago, I sat with my old college buddy Joe on his beach house patio, watching the sunset, listening to Buffet (what a cliché, I know) and drinking cervesas. He’s my most successful friend who, like me, began in modest beginnings. I am always curious as to what makes people tick, so I asked him about his career success. He told me a story from his freshman year in college. His fraternity volunteered to clean up Sun Devil Stadium after a game. As Joe looked around at all the vacant seats in the stadium, he thought about how each one of those seats could represent a day of his life. And when that day was over, he would move to the next seat, never to return to the seat he just left. It was at that point in the story where the engineer in me interjected and pointed out that Sun Devil Stadium has 72,000 seats, which meant he was planning on living to the better part of two years.

He responded with something to the effect of, “Do you want to crap on my point or listen to what I’m saying?” I shut up. Joe continued. Once he had put his mortality into perspective - coupled with the fact that twenty years worth of stadium seats were already gone—he swore to live each day to its fullest and not to be impeded by doubt. I thought about Joe’s parable. Then I engineered it some more and recognized that by the time you take out sleeping, eating, school, work and commuting from the more realistic “30,000 seat stadium,” you are only left with about 9,000 seats for yourself and your passions. 9,000 seats?! Sometimes it doesn’t pay to think like an engineer. Seventy two thousand seats to play with was a nice big number. There’s plenty of room for error with 72,000 seats to use up in a lifetime. But with only 9,000 seats realistically, well, those could waste away before your very eyes if you didn’t watch yourself and mind your time. And Joe’s analogy coincided with something that another friend, Aaron had told me once. He said after you account for sleep, work and family there’s room for only one or maybe two other pursuits, and that’s it. I have used close to one thousand of those seats spending my afternoons in a dojo, following a passion known as jiu-jitsu. And every one of those seats has been on the fifty-yard line. And I have no regrets.

Hi Parnerium, nice to meet you

Most people have more dreams than they have life to dedicate to them. If you spend your whole life doing one thing you love, there's 100 other things you love/might have loved that you missed out on.

i would say that people have all kinds of fancies throughout our lives.
i know ive had a lot of fantasies that were more about my own ego than being a real "Path with Heart" for me, and its not easy to tell the difference sometimes

it crosses all of our noggins at some point that it would be "cool" to play the guitar or that we would really impress people if we could were into skydiving

but these werent really Dreams for me, they were just "cool things that i think i would like to do" or "things i want people to think when they see me"

a Dream is a lifelong desire, a longing that always comes back because its something that you resonate with at the heart of your personality

the feeling that youve missed out by doing it when you could have been doing something else is unthinkable

its the exact opposite that will be true: all the superfluous something else's that were done instead of the Dream will become regrets; they were easier and more convenient and more accessible, but ultimately less meaningful

in a way they were really your enemies, because the role they played in your life was to give you something else to do when you should have been working on your quilt

all this is only true if you HAVE Dream though
maybe some people dont, really, and thats OK too

maybe you (general "you" meaning "whoever it applies to") dont have or need a Dream, because you can be happy doing pretty much anything

if so then youre blessed too, in a different way

but if you DO have a Dream, then my suggestion is to find a way to do something about it.
The sacrifices you make to do what you love will be worth it, and the distractions that keep you from it wont.

It's usually the things I simply cannot achieve for some reason. Those things tend to have attributes which I'd like to develop with myself but instead need to find novel accessible ways. I also track a few dreams which are accessible, yet currently out of reach and these represent financial incentives to manage cashflow etc. Since pleasure seems to be a bit relative to some baseline state of normal - I think if you've reached your dream then you've stagnated, unless that dream is constantly challenging you. My fav answer was 'more time to dream' hehe

Edan wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: i wish i could shake those people and tell them "YOU DONT HAVE TIME TO WASTE!! YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!! IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU LOVE, DO IT, GO DO IT NOW!!"

Unfortunately, not all of us have to means to just 'go do it' :dry:

I hear this a lot.

Thing is, its nothing but a cop out.

At least you can see what your first step needs to be, or more accurately, your second.

In the Sith code, thats why passion comes first, and then strength second.

Passion = I want.

Strength = Building the prerequisites for getting what you want.

Strength, could mean physical, mental, financial, or what have you. Still, it is building the necessary framework to go to the next step.

So, that is your first step, getting the means to " Just go do it".

In fact, if you are looking at it properly, that is part of " Just go do it". Part of the journey, though I am not one to say its more about the journey than the destination, there is a journey to be made.

So go. Do it. Make some sort of forward progression toward your goals.

There will always be challenges.

Obstacles to overcome.

However, at the end of the day, you are either doing it, or not doing it.

Or the other way is trying to justify why you are happy with not getting what you want.

Fox and Sour Grapes

IN many cases - especially the grand and glorious dreams -, we need to wonder whether they are really our own dreams or not. From a very young age, I wanted to either be a sorcerer or an interstellar navigator (not in those precise terms perhaps), but I could devote all the 600 000 hours of my life to that pursuit and not only never achieve it/them, but perhaps never questioning why I might want that ...

Then there is that exercise that Alan Watts talked about, which I think some university students actually did sit, where one had to write out exactly one's idea of heaven or what one desires. In the end, it becomes quite impossible to describe in very accurate detail what that dream would actually manifest were it to come to fruition. There are just too many variables.

I've had a pretty unconventional and interesting life. One might even say adventurous. From Aristotle to R. H. Fisher, we've been told that improbable things happen all the time, and when I'm really thinking clearly I know that empirically as well as intuitively. As such, my dreams now are pretty simple ones, and yet, they seem so improbable - just dreams - right now. We'll see ... There isn't much I can do to make them materialise, no more so than learning transubstantiation or hyper-drive spaceflight from my childhood dreams.

Where we get hung up is when we think of success in the the things that we desire to do. Sure, it takes some sacrifice, as Khaos was saying, and much of that sacrifice may just be approval or appreciation of other people. If we dream of writing stories, then we write stories -- they don't necessarily have to be accepted by editors. If one dreams of dancing, one dances -- it doesn't necessarily have to be with a prestigious dance company. And so forth ...

So, I guess that what I want to be when I'll be a grown up, is a dreamer who has not grown up (something usually said about someone in a pretty pejorative way). Funny, but that is rarely said about me. Pity ...

For I haven't "grown up" in nearly 50 years. I still play at being a sorcerer or a silly git who just can't stay in the same star system for more than a week ...

10
Can you coax your mind from its wandering
and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
supple as a newborn child's?
Can you cleanse your inner vision
until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them
without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from you own mind
and thus understand all things? Giving birth and nourishing,
having without possessing,
acting with no expectations,
leading and not trying to control:
this is the supreme virtue.

"The dream is dead an dreamer too, if dreaming is all that dreamers do"-Chiron.

Where we get hung up is when we think of success in the the things that we desire to do. Sure, it takes some sacrifice, as Khaos was saying, and much of that sacrifice may just be approval or appreciation of other people. If we dream of writing stories, then we write stories -- they don't necessarily have to be accepted by editors. If one dreams of dancing, one dances -- it doesn't necessarily have to be with a prestigious dance company. And so forth ..

I tell students, and fellow travelers that a passion is something you would do even if no one saw, or even if you never made money from it.

Van Gogh didnt sell crap until after he died for example.

Stephen King has drawers full of rejection letters, in fact, his first bestseller was salvaged from the garbage by his wife. Read "On writing" for more of that story.

Tesla also was devoted to his passion, even when th world spurned him and he had almost 0 funds.

Success, need not be on some grand level, but at the same time, I think peoples reach should always just exceed there grasp.

In that, the higher you shoot, or raise the bar, the further you will go even if you do not reach what you first intended.

So, I guess that what I want to be when I'll be a grown up, is a dreamer who has not grown up (something usually said about someone in a pretty pejorative way). Funny, but that is rarely said about me. Pity ...

Its funny, because I tell fellow practitioners and students in BJJ that while self defense is all well and good, I am still a kid who likes to just wrestle around with his friends. I mean, c,mon 17 years of martial arts? You dont do something like that just for self-defense.

I dont know what it really means to be a "grown up" I just know my values have shifted in areas of my life given circumstance, or experience. Like having and raising a child for instance.

Or in regards to what I want to be when...Well, for a long time, I was( and of course still am) just a student out for my own selfish practice.

Now, it has expanded, to teaching, coaching, and all sorts of areas I would not have done 10 years ago.

Passion builds in complexity, if you are willing to give it its due time, and dedication.

Some things, only come with age, and not just your physical age, but time in regarding your passion and practice.

What do I want to be when I grow up? I used to tell joke with my adult guitar students that, seeing as I was already a musician, I'd have a mid life crisis and grow up to be an accountant. In truth though, I don't think we ever really grow up, that is to say, stop growing. I've always fancied that quote attributed to Mohammad Ali, "The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 wasted 30 years of his life". Truth is, I don't ever want to grow up. I want to keep dreaming, creating, striving, longing, becoming, suffering, laughing, crying, until I leave this place and go to whatever's next.

So what do I want to be when I grow up? I want to stay a child, and keep growing, until its time to stop growing and so shed this mortal coil. And when I've passed on and stopped growing, maybe I'll get to do it all again.