When is it time to stop chasing your dreams? When you’re dead, that’s when.
Life is compromise, relationships are compromise, but hold onto your ideals and keep struggling toward them at whatever cost, or you become boring, or worse: bored.
Far too many people ‘settle’ and far too few of us keep up the struggle for their ideals.
But just as bad as settling for something that isn’t one of your immediate goals is to set your goals in stone and never reevaluating them to see if they are attainable/realistic/what you still want. I mean, what would happen if you reached all your goals and/or ideals? Someone asked me a question recently that got me off on a tirade about this. Basically they asked: “What would it take for you to reach a point in your life where you were satisfied with what you had and where your life had taken you?” My answer was nothing, and everything. Nothing because I believe you should always make the best of what you have, and try to be happy with what you have, and nothing because if you are ‘satisfied’ with what you have, then you stop growing. You stop moving toward the next goal, and that stopping is death.
They used to think that sharks had to keep swimming to stay alive, and that would have been a good metaphor here, but they discovered that sharks do stop swimming sometimes, when they sleep. So maybe it still is a good metaphor. I never want to sleep. I want to keep moving until I die.
[I posted this yesterday in response to a blog entry over on myspace. I think it’s important, and also something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately, hence the repost.]