As 40 approaches like a steam engine on steroids, the opportunity to pause and reflect presents itself. I sit now, held captive by a blizzard, in a hotel room in Boston, and I believe it to be no accident that earlier this week, I visited Walden Pond, the place about which Henry David Thoreau wrote. It was there, at Walden in the mid-1850’s, that he scribbled the words that would become my mantra 150 years later – “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams; live the life you’ve imagined!” I have this quote on the cover of a journal in my home. I commissioned an old friend to create a custom piece of art which hangs next to my bed, these words emblazoned, begging to be read and acted upon daily. So, as 40 barrels toward me, have I done this? Do I do this? Am I living intentionally? Is THIS the life I imagined? If not, how can I make it so?
After my divorce in 2012, I set out to live a life designed and created by me, the life that I had always wanted to live, but didn’t, for fear of disappointing my parents, being judged or even scorned by friends and peers. Up until that point, my life had been a series of checked boxes – university, steady paying job with excellent benefits, marriage at a socially appropriate age, a solid group of friends, intermittent travel, and a laundry list of hobbies. It wasn’t a bad life, but it also didn’t totally feel like MY life. It followed the template to which I believed I was to conform. Living outside the box never even occurred to me because I had no idea what that looked like or what kind of ridicule it would garner. So, I lived this life – amassing stuff, staying too long in a dead marriage, and trying to keep up with not just the Joneses, but the Goldbergs, the Smiths, and the Cohens.
On a near daily basis, a voice inside my head would remind me that I didn’t need to impress people, that my stuff wasn’t bringing me happiness, that my marriage was at its end. It took longer than it should have, but the first difficult step was extracting myself from the often mentally and physically exhausting relationship I felt so trapped in. That step alone freed me from a dark and dismal place. Bearing witness, as if from the outside, of my incredible capacity for resilience, I was spurred to begin cultivating a new me, or at least to begin taking measures to get back to pre-marriage me.
What I learned next has managed to make the past 5 years some of the best of my life. I found that a cluttered mind begets a cluttered life and vice versa. I’ve always heard, and believed, that how we do one thing is how we do everything. In this case, the clutter caused by being in a terribly unhappy marriage contributed to the accumulation of “things” – few of which served any kind of practical purpose in my everyday life. As I started to unload the physical stuff, the mental followed suit. I let go of much of the dis-ease that my marriage had caused, and was finally in a place where I could forgive and move forward. It didn’t happen overnight, and it took plenty of internal work and examination of the ugly parts of myself, but it happened. And when it did, my life took on new meaning, new purpose, and a new direction. I vowed to be the woman that I had always wanted to be. I set out to be a woman with whom I would want to be friends.
And here I am now, several weeks after beginning this piece, sitting amongst fellow travelers in the KAL Lounge at LAX, waiting to depart on a 10-day trip to Barcelona – my first time in Spain, my 30th country. I say this, not to brag, not to gloat, but to acknowledge that the shift in my priorities, in my wants and needs, and in my desire to live for me, I am truly living the life of my dreams. The people who matter most to me – my family and friends – don’t always understand how I live the way I do, or why I choose to continue to explore, or even how I came to be so curious about the world. But, they no longer bug me about getting remarried, having kids, or all those other empty boxes I haven’t checked off. They have finally accepted that those boxes likely won’t be checked off, but that the boxes I am checking fill my well to overflowing and make me feel like my life is full of love, laughter, excitement, and most importantly, purpose.
We all have different ideas about what it means to “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams…to live the life you’ve imagined.” Imagining that life is easy. The hard part is having the courage to give up the belief that how others want you to live is the same as the life you were meant to live. In the end, we’ll look back and ask ourselves if we lived a life of meaning – for me, that means having love of friends and family, traveling, and helping others. So, as I board the train to my 40’s, I can say, with confidence, that my life is, indeed, the life of my dreams, the life that I designed for myself. My wish is that you find what Thoreau’s quote means to you, and that you go confidently in that direction.