Our dreams, passions, the purpose we want to fulfill, are usually very difficult to discover, and even more difficult to accomplish. Depending on the complexity, difficulty, competition, training needed, it can take years, decades to succeed. During this striving for what we really want, something else happens to most of us: we rely on other things, our ‘backup plan’, ‘plan B’, to survive… and this often eventually takes over our lives, gradually squeezing out our original dream.

Some people are lucky enough to know what they want and to train for it early, and succeed. Most of us have dreams of what we ‘really want to be doing’, but life keeps intervening with other happenings and we never seem to reach that goal. We rely more and more on ‘plan B’, our more normal, safe, reliable, accepted job and life. And slowly the invisible process begins to happen:

The longer we are living our backup life, even while striving for our dream, the more we become entrenched. The backup plan becomes our new reality, and the new relationships, responsibilities and debts we incur while living the backup life overcome our dreams, steal energy from our striving for our original dream. Often people let go of their original dream altogether, as an old ‘pipe dream’. Or our skills, health, condition decline, and the dream is simply no longer attainable as it was in our youth. Or our backup life permeates our whole lifestyle so completely, it chokes out any possibility of pursuing our original dream.

And sometimes our backup life even comes together for us, we begin to love it and it forms a new, better purpose and existence than what we had wanted for ourselves when we were younger. We often strive for something we’ve ‘always wanted’, yet have never looked deeply into what motivated us for wanting it in the first place, beyond the superficial and immature motivations of our youth. While suffering away, trapped in our backup life, we are forced to deeply look at our reasons to hold on to our original dream. Our plan B life so irrepressibly forces us further and further away that, if our motivations for that old dream aren’t grounded in some depth, they more easily fade away, dissolve and lose their attraction to us, as we age into wiser beings with more matured motivations.

Originally, when we’re young and we have a dream, the dream consumes us; we eat, sleep, work towards it, talk about it, try arrange our lives around it and focus mighty effort towards it. The backup life begins innocently enough: while we’re working towards our dream, we still have to eat, right? Pay the bills, have a fall-back job or skill, and we’ll even try to use our fall-back job to pay for whatever supplies we need to accomplish our dream, our ‘plan A’. We work as baristas in coffee shops in order to pay for acting lessons and clothes, to pursue our dreams of acting. We deliver newspapers to pay for equipment for the band, so we can record an album. We work as janitors on night shift so we can practice writing or painting, hoping we’ll eventually get good enough to live on our sold creative works. Almost everyone, everywhere, has used their backup life to try make their dream life a reality.

In the beginning, it’s still all about the dream, even while we’re sinking tentative roots into the backup life. After all, all these ‘other things’ we do are towards our dream. We can still work on the dream after work, on days off, weekends, even on lunch break. But then we meet people in our backup situations. Pretty soon we’re doing things with them once in awhile, during our time off. It becomes harder and harder to squeeze quality chunks of time to work towards plan A, harder to glean time and energy out of the day, out of the new busy life. We still fight for that time and energy, still have the hope, the surety that everything is towards the dream. Interruptions cause frustration, resentment. We’re still living our dream, trying towards it in our minds.

But that slowly dissolves. It is slowly, usually over years, decades, beaten out of us by the inexorable takeover of the backup life. Not in all of us… but in most of us. Most of us are living our backup lives, not our dream lives, not plan A. This is normal, and much has been written about it. As John Lennon put it so well: ‘Life is what happens while you’re making other plans’. You’re planning for your wanted life, and all this unplanned-for stuff takes over. This is natural, this is right, and this even happens to people who DO attain their dream lives early. But I will write more on that in another tool.

All kinds of combinations happen through the years, all kinds of meshing and turmoil between our plans and things we didn’t foresee happening. We find ways to compromise, marry it all together in interesting ways. Many of us will get to middle age, old age, and then the dream can no longer happen, and it might take us many years and much sadness to accept that. And when we finally do, then we will re-evaluate our motivations for wanting that dream, and evaluate what part of it we might still enjoy and want:

Perhaps our long lost dream was to become a champion skater and compete worldwide. Forty years later our life has taken completely different turns and the dream is long gone. But as wizened adults we once again look into that desire, and realize that, though we are no longer young and with stars in our eyes and wanting the fame and competition… we still enjoy skating. Maybe we’ll find a little time to skate once in awhile, without the goal, without the dreams of glory, we’ll just skate for ourselves or with a local group for fun. And maybe that little joy of loving skating… will be enough, now.

But lives take different forms also. Some of us go through huge, messy unplanned lives that take us far away from our original dream so it’s not even an itch any more. We’re so completely transformed into what we used to think of as our backup plan, backup life, that it takes over. We accept it, it no longer feels like the secondary, the disappointment, the less fulfilling. We grow to love it, we fully and completely accept that this way of life we didn’t plan for, didn’t even want at one time… is now IT. We embrace it, learn to love it, and would not even go back to the ‘old dream’ even if it were thrown straight at us to have.

And some of us DO revisit the original dream, albeit in a matured way, and find out it’s time to do something about it. Perhaps we went through decades of the backup life, even had a family, became totally different people than we’d planned, had all kinds of unforeseen experiences, and realize that we ‘had to learn all that’… in order to truly fulfill our dream. In youth, we want our dreams NOW, we want to enjoy them while we’re young and full of piss and vinegar, want to show our accomplishments off and build a life around them. And it’s far too much to ask a young person to understand, even believe and obey, that perhaps it is not right for them to fulfill their dreams when young. Maybe there is so much in store for them to learn before they can follow their dream in a healthy way, that they simply must age years or decades… and then succeed. That is scary stuff, when you’re young. You don’t want a life of disappointment and suffering, and then to fulfill your dream when you’re fifty or eighty… and yet that is the way it must work out, for so many of us.

Wonderfully, the backup life also adds whole new dimensions to us, dimensions that can actually help us achieve our original dream. During our backup life, we learn a lot of reality, different things than we would have if we’d been successful and slid into our dream life right away. I see the occasional person who has become successful early at what they strive for, and their growth has been stunted in other ways. They are missing the experience, the wisdom that can only be gleaned from being subject to powerlessness, to failing at each step, to the ‘other side of life’, the way other people live and get through their lives when things are in the crapper.

Like a person who is struck by the acting bug at a young age; perhaps they can never quite learn to act naturally and well, or their looks are not right for any young-person part, no director will accept them. The dream never happened, they sank into their backup life and relationships, labor jobs, addictions, succeeded in other ways, grew older… then realized they had led a full life, a life that has added millions of miles of experience to their personality, expression, depth. They remember how much they enjoyed acting, so they give it another whirl… and become successful, older and wiser and more natural actors, solidly and believably inhabiting any part they play. Their ‘B life’ gave them that, brought them full-circle back to the original dream, just at a later time. They needed to live a different life, in order to achieve the original one they wanted. Funny (and maddening), the circles existence puts us through.

Your dreams, your A life, your backup life and jobs, even your C, D, E lives, things you definitely did not want in your life, are there, struggling with each other from your birth to your death. Your wants, dreams, skills, successes, failures, devastations, surprises, it’s all in there and needing to be organically blended with each other. The younger you are, the more these things are separate from each other; the life and things you want and plan are on one side, and the life and things you didn’t plan, whether you like them or not, are on the other side, separated, a strong delineation between them.

Then you grow older, and these differences become more seamless, less separate. You learn that it’s not just one or the other, the dream life or the backup life, the planned life or the disappointment. You learn to dance. You put them together in the same room, your life, and you try allow them all to get along. The loved and hated, wants and don’t wants, planned and unplanned, become organic within the dance, and create its entirety.

It’s all YOU. A and B are not separate lives and wants. They must dissolve together in order for you to feel whole. If you’re still feeling fractured, like there’s a difference between the life you dreamed of and the life that was actually pooped on you, you’ll always feel weak, less than whole, unhappy, searching.

It takes years, but please: merge all those separate lives of yours into a completion, a whole that you fully accept is YOU and is not ‘missing anything’. You aren’t missing anything, in order to be what you now are. But your mind might still be separating parts of your life, keeping the life you have apart from the life you really wanted.

MERGE YOUR LIVES INTO ONE

The parts of you that you don’t want… are still parts that contributed to the whole of you. Instead of running from them, trying to excise them from your life, if you accept them as being there and inescapable, perhaps that very acceptance will help you integrate them more organically with the things you really do like and want for yourself.

There are still many circumstances in my life that I do not want, never have wanted, and wish I were not part of. Some of them I can escape, others I can escape only through making some shocking change to the way things are, and still other are things I simply cannot escape. But when I step back and look at all these things I do not want, I realize how deeply they have impacted my life, my personality, the whole of what I am. This helps me embrace them and accept their oneness with the other things in my life that I do like. It does not make me like them any better, but it helps me embrace their presence instead of fighting for separation from them all the time.

I have let go of trying to separate my B life from my A life. They are one. I don’t need to say ‘This isn’t me’ when I’m doing things, part of things that really don’t feel like me, and I don’t need to say ‘That is what I want to be’, as I’m trying to change my circumstances for the more authentic. I accept both the liked and the disliked being present together, and I accept that I like and dislike circumstances in my life. To realize that they both exist together and to stop thinking of them as separate lives, allows all that happens, good and bad, to comprise a oneness that I call ME.

This makes it easier, more pleasant, to endure the dislikes; it keeps my mind clear, rather than fighting and complaining all the time about that which I do not want. The life I plan for, and the life that happens while I’m striving for those plans, are the same life. You are causing unnecessary amounts of turmoil when you keep trying to separate them. There will ALWAYS be a plan B interfering with your plan A; you are human and there are always unforeseen complications and roadblocks, so the interruptions to your plans are inescapable.

Treat them as a part of your life, not an invader. Because they are a part of your life. Allow them to merge, in your mind. It’s all you.

MERGE YOUR LIVES INTO ONE