Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Livin' the Dream

A character in a movie that I was watching yesterday said that she was living her dream. The movie was Starting Over from 1979, starring Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh, and Candice Bergen. If you haven't seen this movie, I highly recommend taking a day out for a Jill Clayburgh fest and adding this to the queue. Candice Bergen's character gets a recording contract, which is pretty funny in itself, as she is tone deaf and her voice is beyond hilarious. Even though she and her husband are recently divorced and he is still struggling emotionally, she's feeling pretty great; she's living her dream. When Candice's character Jessie made that statement, it sent all sorts of marvelous images running through my mind of living my dream. How would it feel to actually be at a place in life where I could say that? Is it possible that even after forty I might one day reach a point where I am living my dream? I don't know why it took a character in a Burt Reynold's movie to open my imagination to the possibility of living my dream in this lifetime, but it did.

Last night I was driving my daughter home from play practice, listening to the Human League, transported back to my teenage self in 1983 when my whole life was about dreams and believing without a doubt that one day I would live them. Don't You Want Me is playing on the radio, I am starring in the role of mother to a teenage daughter, however I felt as though at forty-one I had a magnificent life ahead of me. I'm not just talking about a life spent driving carpool and doing laundry; I'm not complaining about these things because I do love being a mom. The vision that I saw was of me in a convertible driving around California, my hair mussed by the wind, living the life of a writer that actually makes money, like enough money to live on comfortably. In my dream I am living this creative life, the one that I wanted since I was a kid, the one that I should have been living all along. Feeling like,"wow it's still possible, everything is still possible". I want this year to be the best year of life that I have had so far. Like Candice Bergen's character Jessie, I want to say one day in the very near future, "I am living my dream".

No comments:

Post a Comment