Following your dreams is romanticized until you start doing it.
When it’s just a ‘maybe someday’ kinda feeling that lives in your brain. That you play out in your mind like a high-cost cinematic production. That part of following your dream is so much more romantic because it’s the highlight reel that you get to live out over and over again in your mind.
That montage in your mind where you’re slowly sipping your cup of coffee, thinking of all that could be. All of the new restaurants you’ll frequent, the new flavors of food you’ll try, the people from different walks of life that you’ll come across… the novelty of something new.
But when you start to follow your dreams — if you actually muster up the courage to pursue it — that’s when it becomes unromantic.
Because following your dreams isn’t always a cinematic production. For all of those highlight reels, there are many more moments that are simply… boring. The minutia of the day-to-day. Or maybe even exhausting. Frustrating. Lonely. Maybe all of those things at the very same time.
Following your dreams is slow.
It can feel mundane. And unextraordinary. And sometimes those voices of doubt kick in that ask you whether this was the right choice or the right time. The kinda questions that leave you feeling foggy, uninspired, and doubtful. It’s those stretches of ‘just ordinary days’ that feel monotonous and flat. Like the vast plateaus that span a third of the Earth’s land.
“To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them.
To love the plateau is
to love what is most essential
and enduring in your life.” -George Leonard
It’s in those stretches of monotonous and uneventful days that you have to find the spark from within. That feeling that you get when you play out your highlight reel montage. That gets your blood flowing, thoughts running, and your heart racing. Following your dreams is believing you are capable of achieving all of that even during the plateaus of your life.
Following your dreams is finding that thing within you, whatever you call that thing — drive, passion, magic, inspiration, the universe, your soul, the guidance of a higher power — the thing that makes you impervious to thoughts of giving up. And reminding yourself that those uneventful moments added up are the moments when slowly and patiently, you begin to follow your dream.
Find life in these moments.
Walk through those plateaus so that you can keep doing the boring things that make way for the bigger things. Keep working that day job and do it with pride. Keep writing those Medium blog posts that you think likely won’t be read because it’s practice for scripting out something bigger.
Keep stumbling through life with openness. Be exhausted, be uncertain, be ordinary. But above all else, be dedicated to this most essential and enduring part of your life. Beyond every plateau is a horizon waiting. And who knows, you might just live out your highlight reel there.
