When you’re a kid people tell you, “Do what you love.”
When you have kids, life tells you, “Do what keeps food on the table and kids up to date on their vaccinations,” so doing what you love takes a back seat until the avalanche of bills and to-do’s pushes doing-what-you-love into the trunk like the gym shorts you keep forgetting to take out and wash.
Then your kids start thinking about what they love, and you want them to do what they love because you know it’s the only way they will be fully happy with their life. And you stop and wonder why you stopped doing what you love and who are you to be lecturing your own kids about life anyway.
And you have a choice.
You can ignore keep the to-do’s and bills on the front burner and tell your kids to just focus on getting by, or you can move some of the to-do’s to the back burner and light the fire under what you want to be your life work.
When you do light that fire, you have to be prepared for a lot of unintended consequences. You have to be prepared to be happier, even if you’re not richer. You have to be prepared to feel peaceful, even if you’re dog tired from being up all night doing what you love (not that, get your minds out of the gutter). And you have to be really prepared to start seeing the world for its possibilities and not just its problems. You have to be ready to do things you never thought o as you (in my case this involved being uncharacteristically organized last night and getting a half a dozen orders processed in less than an hour). And you have to be prepared to feel hope in a big way.