I believe in dreams, big and small. I believe that the only way to live, and I mean truly live not just exist, is to find a way to wake up every morning and have your first thought be, “Thank you for the opportunity of this day.”
My father passed away at a young age, long before he accomplished what he set out to do in life. In John Lennon’s beautiful words, he died with the music still in him. I learned a lot of lessons from his passing, and the most important is this: time waits for no one.
It took me longer to learn the unintended consequence of finding what you’re truly passionate about: once you know your passion, you have very little desire to do anything else. All of a sudden every moment you spend on something else begins to feel like time wasted, time that could have been spent more wisely and productively on your passion. It’s as if there’s a beautiful piano sitting in the corner, cased in glass. Lovely to look at, though not easily shared and certainly of little benefit to anyone else.
To sit down at that piano and play is to make use of your passion. And this is true too of the dream you have to start a company or program, to paint, to write, to serve a cause that’s important to you, to love. To be of real value, dreams must be brought into being, not just thought of and then shelved.
There is certainly the fear factor. It is frightening to say, “This is what I stand for, who I mean to be,” because there is no going back. Once you’ve actualized a dream, once you’ve defined it clearly for yourself, you must go do it or it literally chews you up. It haunts you, follows you around everywhere you go. There is no way to shake it loose except to grow numb. And numb is a frightening state in which to exist.
When my father passed away, he was numb on the outside and raging on the inside. He died a lonely, disappointed man. And the saddest part is that he had no one to blame in the end but himself. Yes, he faced horrendous and tremendously difficult obstacles. He struggled and somewhere along the way, long before I was around, I do believe that he tried very hard to bring the life he wanted to fruition. Then the light died; it went out of him and he became a person who lost his way.
I wish I could ask him how and why this happened, why he let the world beat him down. I wonder why he ultimately didn’t have the strength to keep going, to keep dreaming. I want to ask him why he couldn’t wake up until it was just too late.
It’s hard to live with these questions, ones that will never be answered, so instead I make meaning of his life by infusing meaning into mine. By living my passion of building and fostering healthy systems, I not only fulfill my dream for my own life; I also get the opportunity to fulfill my father’s, too. The other unintended and delightful consequence of living our passions is redemption.
Christa Avampato 