Toothbrush Revelations

So, as I was flossing and brushing my teeth last night I came to a conclusion about the difference between living your dreams out and fulfilling your dreams. I believe that clever thoughts tend to come to us in the most obscure places, and generally at the one and only time that day that you do not have a pen and little pad of paper to write them down on. It's actually quite fun to have to repeat these ideas to yourself over and over, until you finally do get to the pen and paper, in order to prevent these treasures of thought from escaping you forever. Sometimes people ask you what you are doing, or they interrupt your train of thought by asking you a question, and the fight between that desperately repeated fleeting thought and the answer to the question they asked have a little fight inside you. It gives you a sort of roller-coaster feeling. It's quite thrilling, really. Dangerous even, because what if that thought slips through your fingers? But I digress.

I was flossing and brushing my teeth, when a project from my tenth grade English class popped into my head. I don't often reminisce about high school, so I decided to let this little remembrance run it's course. We had to create a portfolio of poetry, essays, and other such English-type things, that had to do with our future goals. It was one of those "character building" projects. Anyhow, I had titled mine "Fulfilling Dreams." Then it occurred to me: There is a difference between living your dreams out and looking forward to fulfilling your dreams. Sometimes when you live your little dreams out now you end up sacrificing things that could have gone towards fulfilling the real big-picture dreams that you have-the vision you have of yourself of what you'll be at the end of your life.

I sort of laughed to myself as I thought about that project, because I realized that even though more than ten years have passed since I stayed up until 3am working on my portfolio, I do the same thing today. Instead of living out the dreams that I have right now, the gut instinct desires of my heart or thoughts that pop into my head that seem difficult but still plausible-these little gems of dreams are sometimes sacrificed to my looking ahead to the chest of dreams that I know I can get to at the end of the treasure hunt.

While that seems like a good and worthy sacrifice, I had to pause (well, I kept brushing) and think about whether those little "gems" really ever needed to be sacrificed in the first place. That sent me in to one of those fast-forward looks at the little gems I'd sacrificed in the past in order to get to where I am, and decide whether I'd made the right choice. And even though I'd like to do some of those things still, I didn't feel any pain at having to sacrifice what has come my way so far. Which is a good sign that either they wouldn't have been good for me, or I'll get the chance to do them at some other point in time anyhow. Maybe it's not a clever thought, but at least it lasted long enough for me to finish brushing my teeth--and taking out my contacts, mind you.