You’ve done this.
At some point in your life you’ve told someone about something you were going to do. It was something you were passionate about: an idea you had for a t-shirt company, a trip planned for Antarctica, or maybe the sailboat you wanted to buy. Whatever it was, you were excited about it. You wanted it more than anything. And at the time, it seemed like a great idea. It probably was.
But then you told someone about it, and that felt good. They were excited for you. They asked questions and wanted to know more, so you told them. Your heart beat faster as you shared your fantasy with them, embellishing every detail. It felt so good that you told someone else, and then another person, and then a group of people, and so on until most of the people closest to you were in on it. They all knew about this plan you had, and it was going to be great.
But that was it. It was a story. It was a story that had been told, and retold, and lived without every really being lived. It had become so nearly real that its existence became irrelevant, superfluous. The plan became the act, and there was no longer a need to follow through with it.
Then you felt ashamed, like you had let these people down, these people whom you had told about your dream. But it was more than that. You had let yourself down. You struggled to come to terms with why you hadn’t followed through, why your dream had faded and you were left only with your routine, your day to day, your same old same old.
But it wasn’t because you are weak that you let your dream die. It was because you lost your flow. All the energy you needed to put your difficult plan into action was released in words, in the stories that flowed from your body to the people that you told.
I know because I have done this far too often. I am a dreamer. I seek the mysterious, and I long for adventure, but it hardly ever comes. Like you, I tell it all. I talk it out of me.
And in the end I lack the energy to leave the comfort of the mundane.
I’ve lost my flow.
