“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” – Michael Althsuler

One night last week I was suddenly woken after having a good dream. I often wake abruptly from good dreams like most people wake from bad dreams. When this happens, I rarely can get back to sleep as my mind begins the process of reminiscing about the time in my life that this dream had taken place. This time, it was about my first ever real job at Burger King 20 years ago (holy crap time flies!). I met a lot of good friends there, I got to experience financial freedom for the first time and I got to experience that brief moment in my life where I was caught between being a kid and being an adult. I had some money, I had some freedom yet I didn’t have any responsibilities that kept me up at night.

I am not one to remember my dreams but whenever I do, they are framed from that era of my life. Until recently, I haven’t given it too much thought as to why I keep reaching back to then in my dreams. I think it has to do with my independence. It was during this time that I had only started to become me and I had begun to gain self-confidence and social awareness. Even though at the time I thought it was trivial and that time would ever end; I wanted to get on to the next phase of my life.

As life wears on, I am realizing that as each phase of my life passes -good or bad, I need to make the most of whatever point in time I am in. Live in the present as they say. Each one of these phases has lessons to be learned. There have been some very trying times and some things that have happened in my life that I would rather forget but it is each of these phases that I have lived through that enabled me to grow. While it is not healthy to dwell on the past, it is also unhealthy not to learn from it.

I am now entering the middle stages of my life and I have no idea how many more of these stages I have left. I can only hope that 20 years from now, I am woken by new dreams that are framed from the stage in life I am in now. Each day before my brain enters the night shift, I remind myself that it was a good day. Whatever challenges I may be dealing with right now will not always be there tomorrow. My life will never seem quite as bad or as good as it seems right now when I wake up from my dreams of tomorrow because life’s wisdom will put it all into perspective.

Could I be dreaming right now?

805 / 1000 KMs walked | 37 / 50 blog posts | 14 / 10 books read