The Hamster Wheel

Life as we know it is a Hamster Wheel. Once we’re old enough to fend for ourselves, we get on and we start running. Society, family, school, work, football; they all continually hang carrots of achievement in front of us so we keep running along chasing them, under the illusion that if we finally catch them the wheel might slow down or we might feel a sense of achievement. But do we ever stop to ask the question… what are we running for?

Life has become a ‘tick the box’ phenomenon, whereby we complete life goals and achievements, tick them off and move onto the next. School. Tick. Uni. Tick. Travel. Tick. Work. Tick. House. Tick. Kids. Tick. More often than not, these ticks run to a chronological schedule of expectation and we spend our years, months, weeks, days, hours working away at getting our ducks in order, in the expected order. Granted these milestones do provide a sense of achievement and fulfilment, but perhaps not to the level they could if they were actually the dreams and aspirations we wanted to pursue, instead of the ones we are told we have to.

We’re all in a hurry to get somewhere. To get something done. To tick the boxes, in order.

But what if you stepped off the wheel? What if you blindfolded your ducks? What if instead of looking forward, you stepped forward and looked back instead?

Picture yourself in ten years. Beyond the facial hair choices and Bupa advertisement health moments you might be envisaging, stop and think; if you were standing there, ten years ahead in time looking back at what you had done in the last ten years, what would you hope to see?  Who would you hope to see? Where would you hope to have been?

The trick is, when you step forward and look back, the achievements and the milestones become less temporal, less ordered and sometimes less relevant. It doesn’t matter in what order you have done things, it doesn’t matter if you did them a little different to everyone else or to what you thought you might have done. What matters is that as you stand there in imaginary ten year’s time, you feel a great deal of happiness and contentment, a sense of pride in what you have achieved and your ability to negotiate the curve balls of life to lead a fulfilling and purposeful life.

Stepping forward and looking back, contemplate the things you would like to have done, the people you would like to see and the places you would like to have been and then make a new list. Of hopes and aspirations, of life goals and dreams, of the values the person you would like to be lives by.

And then commit yourself to spending the next ten years living your life in pursuit of these things, in no order, just in the general spirit of living your life every day in the most meaningful and purposeful way you can.

Your dream for the future shouldn’t be stagnant or material, it shouldn’t be written by other people or be one of expectation, it should be simple.

The ability to think independently, to march to the sound of your own beat, to have dreams and possibilities limited only by your imagination & to get off that bloody Hamster Wheel.

Carpe Diem.