Living Your Joy A Practical Guide to Happiness

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 effortlesslywithout 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 withcatastrophic 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 everythinggetting up at five, writing after the kids go to sleep, keeping notebooks, joining a writing groupand 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 ofFalter-Barns, Suzanne is the author of 'Living Your Joy A Practical Guide to Happiness', published 2003 under ISBN 9780345439178 and ISBN 0345439171.