I wish I'd been more courageous as a younger man, but that's just water under the bridge now. If life were like a blackboard and I had the eraser in hand, I still wouldn't rub out the bad decisions I've made. I don't want to go back and do it again, am ready to accept the direction some of those bad decisions took me. In your twilight years, bad decisions can haunt you, but along with them come some good things I don't want forgotten. They're too much a part of me to turn loose of, and in fact are perhaps things that make me what I am. Hindsight is sometimes a better view than looking down the road ahead. Uncertainties abound, but you have no choice but go forward.
Most of my fearfulness is due to love. Not much can happen to me to make me fearful unless it happens to someone I love, and that's the great anchor in life. It holds you in place, can even enslave you in a prison you want no part of. You can't expect your dreams to be shared by those around you. They often can't envision what you can, and they don't want to listen to you talk much about them. What you see as practical sounds ridiculous to them; this is often the case. I'm not talking about fragile relationships here but rather long term affairs that have brought some real meaning to your life. Only a fool would give that up for a dream. But we're all fools from time to time, and the real fool is the one who quits on a dream because they can't share it with those they love.
Examine, if you will, just what love is, or is supposed to be. If someone refuses to share your dream, or in fact dismisses it as a trivial escapades into the world of fantasy, they are disrespecting your vision. That's not love. I don't know what it's called by others, but I call it selfish love. I'll love you if . . . you see it my way. If someone chides you, ridicules your dream, the disrespect deepens, and the love becomes less that true love. Love requires of us respect, some trust, some understanding, but it also requires some resistance to foolishness. It's out of love that a parent punishes a child for being foolish; it's out of love a spouse might point out the foolish direction you've taken. But to anchor down and refused to budge when an idea is presented to you, foolish or not, is disrespectful. And you can't say, "I'm doing this for your own good." You're doing it for your good.
I just finished a book about a man love killed. He had a vision his wife wouldn't share, would not budge, wouldn't even bend an inch. And like many men would do, he tried to live with what she wanted. An overpowering sense of duty held him in place, and so he kept living in a miserable situation until it overpowered him . . . and he took what he saw as his only way out, and put an end to a life he could no longer tolerate. He never came to realize that his wife would've preferred him dead and in a grave at home than alive and happy somewhere else. He let his love for a selfish, fearful woman kill him because he knew he'd never find contentment anywhere else without her. So, why couldn't he be happy staying right where he was? He envisioned a better life, had a dream, and it wouldn't die. You might argue he killed himself over the love of a dream, a foolish idea, but you still can't explain away the actions of his selfish wife.
So, why would I point this out? Listen, dammit! Don't turn away from someone who loves you when they dream. You can disagree, try to point out the foolishness in the dream, but don't anchor down and refuse to listen. Here's the upshot of it all: If you can't share a dream with someone you love, consider the possibility that it''s not really love at all keeping you together. Obligation and duty are wasted when you lose the real anchor, that of love that's shared . . . and respected.
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