Dear LPG readers,

Here is a question that I keep asking myself more often as I get older… ‘Is there something that you have always wanted to do, but that you have not achieved so far?’

I think that it is something that all little children get asked sooner or later, and the answer often seems so simple when you are at primary school.  Can you remember that moment when you met someone new who, after asking your name, followed that question with, ‘… and what do you want to be when you grow up?’

By the time we get to secondary school, the question keeps being asked but we learn to appreciate the complexities that achieving our original goal will involve and, with all the other things we learn about life in general, we have a habit of either watering down that first innocent answer or allowing ourselves to be forced to change direction when it comes to answering the question.

Then work and family life gets in the way, all those little occurrences which we tend to stumble upon rather than plan and, so many of our childhood ambitions will be transferred into the ambitions we have for our children.   Ambitions which they were never really going to realise for us.

It might have been true when we, the pensioners of today were young, that we were more ready to follow the advice of our parents when it came to vocation, but I have noticed that the children of today feel the need to rebel as soon as they can talk.  Did your children work in the industry that you had hoped they would because it is what you would have chosen for yourself? I suspect that they don’t work or live very close once you get to pensionable age and it is true that you can only derive so much achievement when seeing someone else living your dream.   

We have had far too much time to think about such things over the past year which is obvious because I have taken the time to write my thoughts down, but perhaps there are three things to consider before giving up that original dream altogether.  I like to call them the ‘do, could and will’ factors involved.

Do you still regret not managing to achieve whatever it is that you would have liked to?  Could you, in spite of your present circumstances do anything which go some way towards making that dream a bit more of a reality? And ‘what is stopping you getting started right now?

If you are ten times older now, and your original plan was to be a brain surgeon or bus driver when you were seven, it is not going to happen, but even if you have to make do with the really watered down version or work at it virtually perhaps it is worth revisiting.

I think that the most important reason to keep living is ‘purpose’, and what better purpose is there than to go some way toward realising your original dream?  Remember it is not a case of ‘you haven’t done it’, it is more that ‘you have not done it yet’.

RB, Brockley