Sunrise and the Dawn of A New Day

For the first time in years, I feel some feelings rising in me that have been absent for far too long. I am experiencing impatience. I want things to get moving again. I want to start working again. I want to feel like I am living my life again... not just passing through the days and weeks and years, sedated and numb. I want to feel successful again and I feel the need to go after the real American dream once more... the Dream in which we can pursue the opportunity to find out what kind of stuff we are really made of.

Now I am not in a quest for the better car or the bigger house. I am not trying to build my kingdom in whatever industry I happen to land with my next job. What I do want is a decent level of income and a sense that I am finally successful in terms of my own definition of what I believe personal success to be.

I want to feel like I make a difference in the world and I want to like what I am doing, at work and at play. No longer do I want to feel trapped in my own life, because I have created my own cage as a consequence of the mistakes I made. I don't want much... except that elusive sense that I am living the life that I was meant to live, instead of one imposed on me by others or by the necessity to pay for all the unnecessary stuff I thought I needed. Everybody wants that. Few are smart enough or disciplined enough not to fall into the avoidable pitfalls that trip us up along the way.

So, I have reignited that fire in my belly. I have stoked it and soon it will be raging within me. I am definitely going in the right direction. It has taken time to do that and it has not been easy for me to get this far. But I still have a long way to go.

Now it is time for a remembrance of things past... things I knew once, but somehow forgot.

What things?

Rediscovering a passion for living. And a passion for what I am doing. And a passion for the people I care about.

Unwavering commitment to my goals, my dreams, my aspirations.

Developing an unshakable focus which will enable me to stay the course, no matter how difficult things may get for me.

Being true to myself. Being true to the values and the qualities which uniquely define me.

Being kind to myself. Being able to look in the mirror and actually like the person who I am seeing.

Remembering not to be too hard on myself. Accepting that I cannot achieve perfection in the things I do and that I can never achieve perfection in myself.

Realizing that sometimes I will have to forgive myself, if I stumble or if things sometimes do not work out as planned.

Remembering to make sufficient time in my busy schedule for my family and my true friends, because my relationships with them are the only real treasures in my life.

Always remembering and appreciating the people who have helped me along the way to achieve my successes, because none of us make it on our own.

And very importantly, at this very late date, to search out and find positive role-models from whom I can draw inspiration, as I set out to become the person I was meant to be... as I set out to build the life I was meant to live.

Remembering these feelings, these ideas is just not enough. I have to put them back into my life and into my thinking, replacing pieces which may have fallen out from that jigsaw puzzle which is my life.

Everything I will have done so far is just a prelude to the most important part of the process. After clearing my head and clearing my agenda of all unnecessary distractions, I would need to write a mission statement for the rest of my life. I would have to clearly lay out what is important to me and what things I want to accomplish in the years that I still have to live. Only after I have done that can I develop a working strategy to make all my dreams and my hopes and my goals happen, given that all things turn out to be equal.

The preparations made, I will have but one thing left to do. As Jean Luc-Picard, of the Starship Enterprise was heard to say so many times, "Make it so!." I would have to take my plans and carry them out, committed, focused and dedicated to the proposition that at the end of the day, the people I knew in this world will have cause to say that I made a difference in their lives... in the world.

I have learned that my life is not about me and my accomplishments. I am not concerned about my place in history. I just want the rest of my journey count for something more than the amount of money I will have been able to accumulate in the bank before I die.

Please understand that I won't complain if I actually can make a lot money in the years to come. However, I now know clearly that possessing wealth is just a means to an end. There was a great line about that in the musical, Hello Dolly. "Money is like manure. It isn't much good unless you spread it around." And in the end, what I believe should be most important about my life is that I leave behind me a legacy of love for the people who were important to me and that I will have hopefully made a difference in the lives of the people with whom I spent some time during the journey.

So there you have it. I know what I want to accomplish. I have remembered what I need to be thinking about. I have clear sense of what I have to do. Now, all that's left for me to do is just to do what I will have to do, whatever that turns out to be. Sounds simple. It's not.

But then, nobody ever told me that getting through my life was ever going to be a simple or easy matter. Think about it. If it were, in that context, the very notion of success would have little or no meaning. If it were, where would we find any sort of challenge in trying to live each day as caring, decent and successful people?

For me, tomorrow morning will be the dawn of a bright, new day. The sun will rise into the sky. I can sense that this new day is going to be full of hope and promise of good things to come. Very soon, I will finally be moving on, once again. But for now, I have many things I will need to do in preparation, before I can book my passage into the future.