Reaching For More

Next month I will celebrate my 26th birthday.

I have been reevaluating a lot of things in my life lately.

I have been coming to the conclusion that there are certain things that I MUST do before I die. Dreams that I have had since I was a teenager that I have a deep sense that I need to fulfill.

One might refer to these things as a bucket list. If you watched the movie "The Bucket List" you understand that most of the incredible things the two gentlemen did were in the last year of their lives. That is all well and good, but I would like to incorporate my list into my entire life.

I believe that things are so much more attainable than we are willing to believe. When I think about these 25 years that have been my life I realize that I have pursued in a responsible, yet sometimes reckless enough manner to achieve some incredible things that I never thought possible.

I have worked in an orphanage in Africa.

I have hiked a glacier in Alaska.

I own season tickets to the Florida Gators football games. 50 yard line. 39 rows up. In the shade.

I recorded an album and made money from it. And I actually liked my album even though I usually hate listening to myself.

I was the keynote speaker at a week long camp in Philadelphia. The goal of the camp was that over 300 high school students from different parts of the US would come and be a part of rebuilding and renovating homes in a poor area of the city. At night all of the students and adults would listen to what I had to say. The crazy thing was that a lot of the people acted like they couldn't wait for me to speak the next evening.

I am a waiter at a restaurant. I kind of hate it, but I always thought that I would be good at it and I have had the chance to accomplish that.

I married someone that is cool and that is hot.

I have built a snowman.

I once had a conversation in American Sign Language with a stranger as a result of me taking classes for it.

I write these things out because I believe that I could look at my life and think of how boring it is. I could sit around and feel stuck in my job and that I am not useful. But the truth is that our waves do come. They just don't come every single day or every month. It has taken many years for these dreams to become a reality, but they have become just that.

I understand that we all grow a little hardened and calloused as we get older, but I don't want to be the person that is miserable as a result of that.

I don't want to let go of my dreams just because I haven't reached another one in the last year or two.

One of my goals since I was a kid was that I always wanted to go to Hawaii. The older I got I realized how expensive that would be and that I wasn't sure how I could do that and not feel like I had just wasted a ton of money on myself.

Now I work for Hyatt Hotels. It isn't an amazing job and a lot of times it makes me into a person that I don't want to become, but there are things about it that are pretty awesome. So next August I have booked for my wife and I free rooms at 3 different Hyatt Resorts on 3 different islands in Hawaii.

The rooms are $400 a night to the average joe. For us they will cost nothing. I don't feel that bad about it either. I work all the time and very hard so that my wife and I are at peace with our finances and also so that we are able to be married. She does the same and more. So for a reward for barely seeing each other for the first 2 and a half years of our marriage we are going to spend 2 and a half weeks in one of the most beautiful places that I could imagine going and we are going to be able to do that saving quite a bit of money.

It is funny how dreams become a reality. I kind of hate my job. But the rewards can be outstanding.

What dreams do you have that you have given up on?

What is there deep within your sould that you feel that you MUST do?

I feel like we could reach for more if wanted to. Maybe we are afraid of failure or things similar, but I think if we looked at the things that we have already accomplished we will realized that our dreams aren't that far from being a reality. The fun part is that most of the time we have no idea how things worked out in our favor. We just knew we had to do something and it got done.

Hold on to those dreams. We live once. I am 26. I will contine to grow older until I stop breathing. I feel pretty satisfied out how my life has turned out so far and the amount of things that I have been able to accomplish. But I don't want to stop there.

There is so much out there and there is so much within us.

What if we just believed that we could do some incredible things and then focused on them when they actually happen?