What Happens When The Dreams Don’t Come?

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A late-night muse visited my sister Liz a few nights ago and now we’re in an exciting development stage for Life Dreaming, an amazing project we’re working on together.

It’s a collection of tools to help you focus on what’s important in your life right now. Not what your friends or family say is important, not what society says is important, but what’s important to YOU. Your goals, your dreams, the people who are important and the things that make you happy.

But I wondered while I was reading a draft of it over the weekend (our first full one, woohoo!)… what happens when your mind goes blank? What happens when you just don’t know what makes you happy?

In that weird way that the world works, I was reading a TED Q&A with Sir Ken Robinson today and he had some suggestions for exactly that question.

“I encourage him to keep trying new things. Part of it is to spend time with yourself introspectively, to meditate even, to be inward-looking, and to think of the times and experience you had where you really did feel an affinity with something you were doing. And the element may be something you did back in your childhood. It may be something you used to do that you stopped doing. Writing, reading, model-making, sports. Maybe you encountered an obstacle. Or maybe you were discouraged from doing it. Or reached a different point in your life.

“One of the way to find it, by the way, is not by just kind of jotting it down, words on a page — although that’s often a good way to do it — is to do a storyboard. Take magazines and cut out pictures of things that interest you. Compose a visual collage of things that have always drawn your interest.

“The second is to look outwardly. To try things you may not have tried for a long time, or have never tried but wanted to. Put yourself in the way of things. If you’ve never been to a science museum, go to one. If you’ve never been to an opera, go to one. If you’ve never read certain kinds of books, try them. If you always drive a certain way to work, try another way. If there’s some place you haven’t been yet, go there. Expose yourself to possibilities. See what begins to chime with you. My point about being in the element is some people make a living doing it, and others don’t. Some don’t want to. But it’s about finding your own personal element. And the more people are able to do that, the more enriched their lives become, and the more enriched the lives are of those people who are in contact with them.

“It’s something that we all should do, and something that we all can do.”

pic by creativespark

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Filed under Creativity, Life Dreaming

Tags: finding your element, finding your purpose, happiness, Sir Ken Robinson