Stop Daydreaming Your Days Away
Before my wife and I were married, she lived in Tennessee for some time while in college.
One weekend when I was visiting, we drove a few hours to Nashville to see a friend who went to Vanderbilt University.
We met at a great coffee shop off campus.
At one point in our conversation, Dave Barnes came up.
We were and are really big fans of his and our friend made a comment that I couldn’t let go.
She said, “he just played here a few nights ago!”
When I heard “here,” which was combined with a glance around the coffee shop as it was being said, I couldn’t help but wonder how THE Dave Barnes played in THIS tiny coffee shop.
I didn’t hear anything she said for the next 5 minutes.
I spent that time, in my head, surveying the place wondering how it all came together.
It was a big coffee shop, but not fit for any more than 30-40 people.
So many questions were racing through my head:
Where was he positioned?
How did they situate the chairs?
What about sound equipment?
Would he even need sound equipment in here?
Did you need tickets to get in?
Was it an impromptu or secret event?
How long was his set?
How many songs did he play?
Which songs did he play?
With all of these questions, I started filling in the gaps of what I believed would have been best, given all the research I had just done.
What a night it was!
Then, not knowing where the conversation had went the past few minutes, I interrupted to ask how exactly this concert took place.
Her response:
“When I said here, I meant Vanderbilt, not this coffee shop…”
Instantly, this made way more sense.
Simultaneously, I felt… less intelligent!
But it was a fun exercise in my head creating a make-believe situation and puzzling together the missing pieces however I wanted.
I built a story in my mind.
I built a fun, exciting, realistic, plausible, yet false story in my mind.
Have you ever been caught in a daydream?
It’s a fun time let me tell you! However, it has potential to be detrimental to the stories we’re living every day. There’s a tension that exists when daydreams and reality collide.
The problem is not that none of us know how to create good stories.
The problem is that we spend too much time fantasizing, romanticizing, idealizing and even idolizing false stories we create.
Being imaginative, dreaming, storyboarding or fantasizing stories are not bad things at all but when we’re not careful, they can lead us into a place where we start living and believing falsehoods. They’re real to us because we’ve dreamt them up.
But turns out, that’s not the reality we’re living in.
It’s fun to lose track of time creating stories.
It’s irresponsible to live out our time in created stories.
When we live in a false reality, it starts to dehumanize the people around us and deviate us from the ending we’re striving for.
As we dream and create, we need to remind ourselves that we are living the stories of our days.
It’s more than healthy to keep our thoughts in check regularly so our actions reflect the character we desire to be.
What none of us want is to close a chapter of our story, only to look back realizing it was lived out inside our head and nowhere else.
Our actions are writing our stories but our imagination may be keeping us from filling pages.