Living Your Joy: A Practical Guide to Happiness

Book by FalterBarns Suzanne

1

Why You Have More Time than You Think You Do

The common perception of the average Jane these days is that there is never enough time to tend our dreams. Our already overstuffed days are jammed to the breaking point with things we absolutely must attend to. So how are we ever going to squeeze a dream in? In truth, we do, indeed, have time for our dreams. We just can’t necessarily do this dream thing comfortably, easily, and effortlessly—without any inconvenience to ourselves.

Ah, but there’s the rub about dreams: They are almost always totally inconvenient. They require you to do things like stay up late or get up unbearably early; they demand you stick your neck out and ask for loans, or grants, or personal contacts. So most of us never have time for our dreams, because we don’t want to add more inconvenience to our lives. Who in their right mind would?

Furthermore, no dream ever comes with a guarantee. You might put up with all that inconvenience just to find that things don’t turn out the way you’d planned. So rather than risk it, you tell yourself you’ll do the big dream “someday,” when it’s bound to be more convenient, rather than trying to get on with the dream now. And since, of course, the dream will never get more convenient, that’s when and where the whole project dies a quiet death.

The truth is that you do have the time to do anything you darn well please in this life. After all, who fills up your date book with plans and obligations?

You do.

No one is holding a gun to your temple, insisting you show up at work early or stay late. And nobody is insisting you take on one more volunteer activity you don’t even want. Whether you realize it or not, you and you alone have designed your life to be exactly the way it is.

Perhaps you have truly tough circumstances to deal with—catastrophic illnesses, the recent loss of a spouse or a child, or severely limited income. Even so, you still have time to create your dream. In my first book, How Much Joy Can You Stand?, I told the story of Filomena, a twenty-seven-year-old writing student I taught who was completely disabled by a terminal disease. She was barely able to speak, curled into fetal position in a wheelchair, and less than a few years from death. Yet of all the people in my class, she was the only one who showed up week after week with her writing assignment completed. (She typed her work with a stick between her teeth, after translating it from Italian, her native language.) Filomena did the work each week because she was looking death in the face, and so truly understood the importance of getting things done.

You actually do have the time to pursue your dream. And yes, it probably will be grossly inconvenient at least part of the time. Yet such inconvenience has a way of just plain disappearing once you get rolling. Ultimately, it becomes the least of your problems as your ambitions and goals swell and flourish, and you become more single-minded about doing your work.

There are larger forces at play that may keep you stuck in the I-don’t-have-the-time conversation, such as fear and a free-floating sense of defeat. Haya, a writer, told me, “I’ve tried everything—getting up at five, writing after the kids go to sleep, keeping notebooks, joining a writing group—and nothing works. I just can’t fit the writing into my life, no matter what I do.” I asked her what she thought was really going on, and Haya sighed. “I have the thought, It will never amount to anything, so why bother?”

If we only understood how very important our work is in the world, we would make far more time for it. We would rearrange our jobs and our lives and our responsibilities. We would say no more often, and close our office door with relish as we sat down to work. We would truly surrender to the importance of what we’re doing, not only for us but for the rest of the world, as well. For that’s the significance of this dream business—but how many of us can ever admit it?

To fit our dreams into our lives, we must first commit to the idea that they are necessary and important. Then we need to pick a day to start. It could be tomorrow, or it could be January 8. For novelist Isabel Allende, January 8 is a great day to start a book. It was on that day that she began her first novel, The House of the Spirits. The book was such a hit that she decided to start all her books on January 8, what she perceived as “a lucky date.” She told an interviewer, “If I didn’t have a start date, I would procrastinate forever.” Imposing artificial deadlines works, as well. Composer Bobby McFerrin said, “I have to set a goal and a deadline or I won’t get anything done. I have to come up with two or three ideas a day and finish them. I don’t have to like them, but I have to finish them because sometimes I won’t like an idea, but a month later I’ll like it a lot.”

Another tried-and-true trick is to make regular time for your dream—like every day, or at least four times per week, preferably at the same time each day. If scheduling such time seems like too much to bear, then consider the following. Presumably, if you are like many people in the world, you make time regularly to watch television. You may even have “your show” that you absolutely must watch in order to survive. Currently, that is sacred time for you, indelibly written into your schedule, but ultimately what’s more important? Your command of the story line in Frasier or the legacy you leave behind when you die?

Your dream needs this time, and then some. For unless you put in time sitting with the blank page, or making the phone calls, or attending the classes, you will not be holding up your end of the deal. Just thinking about the dream in a loose, abstract way does not cut it. You need to be actively involved with it, and the way to do that is to make regular time in your schedule.

You may feel guilty about such scheduling, because it’s easier to justify scheduling regular time for things like grocery shopping, paying bills, cleaning your house, or sitting on the local school board. Parents with kids do not always feel they can scamper off to the studio to paint after dinner while their spouse does bathtime and bedtime duties night after night. Those who work in offices assume it’s impossible to trot out of work at 5 p.m. to get to the class they need to attend. Society tends to call this behavior selfish, as if our dreams aren’t important enough to risk currying disfavor with spouses, kids, and bosses. We’re raised to deny our souls rather than appear self-centered. Yet to fulfill our yearnings, that’s exactly what we need to do.

If you don’t begin to make your dreams a serious priority, the hunger in your soul will simply continue to eat away at you. You may find yourself slamming tubby toys around like Cruella De Vil, as the people you’d intended to help become the victims of your thinly disguised wrath. When you’re afraid to give your poor soul a little much-needed time to breathe, it will, quite understandably, make you rebel.

I am here to remind you that you can make the time to pursue your dreams, and you can do it in a balanced and even friendly way. You simply need determination, and you need to have a levelheaded discussion about it with the people most directly affected. You really can sit down with your boss or your family and explain your situation calmly and rationally. And you can be creative, too, coming up with new, practical alternatives to the status quo. The point is to screw up your courage and ask, and then be open to how easy such scheduling can be.

You have always had time for your dream.

Now it’s finally time to take it.