So now I wanted to get into what really spurred me to look into the Good Will Hunting quote last week.  I had some questions on my mind about a lot of things…Why do we settle for a picture, an image, an idea, when we can get to work and make those things a reality?  We can watch baking shows on TV all day long but we will never taste that cake.  We can see how long it takes to redo a home but we will never understand the level of work and pride that comes from building something on our own until we build it ourselves. I realized it’s cool to watch things happen and to appreciate talent, but it’s even better to actually experience life—whatever it may be.  So, here’s what happened:

I turned on the computer today and saw a picture of the northern lights in Iceland and immediately thought, “I want to go there someday.”  Immediately after that I thought, “I probably won’t go there but at least we have pictures of it so I can still see it.”  Shock hit me because I’ve rarely been that negative out of nowhere.  I mean, I have a strong negativity bias, but I honestly had just woken up and that was a bit early, even for me, to go down that kind of negative track.  That stopped me for a minute and I thought, I can go there if I want to.  I could go now if I wanted to.  The truth is this: no mater what, there is a way to see it and I am blessed to know it’s real and to have something like that to want to go see. Other people before wouldn’t have even been able to see it, ever.  They’d have been stuck where they are with no way to get there, possibly not even knowing a place like Iceland existed, and possibly heard tell of the magic of the lights and maybe they wouldn’t have even believed something like that could exist—or if they did believe, they could have thought that it was evil—angels and devils sometimes are a fine line.  Even as time went on and we started to get sketches and pictures, people still may not believe it.  Perhaps we’d get an inkling of desire to go see it, to see if it was real.  But the reality is this: We can’t assume we know what it’s like to see the Northern Lights in Iceland because we’ve seen a picture.  Nothing we ever do will let us know what it feels like to stand on that ground, feeling the breeze around our faces, breathing in that air, the feeling of immense yet comfortable smallness seeing the expanse of sky lit up in a way that makes you know something bigger is there, knowing that humanity is so much more fragile than we think and all the crap we do seems pretty insignificant at the end of the day.  There is something bigger. 

Humans are blessed in this day and age to have access to so much information.  It can be overwhelming and even challenging to discern what is real, but we have access to it and we have ways to verify it.  But there is no teacher like experience.  We are problem solvers at our core, we are inventors, developers, creators, collaborators, alchemists, magicians—and we now know how to make things happen.  We have a much larger scope to know what is possible.  If we have a calling to go see the Northern Lights, the Sistine Chapel, or any other of the amazing/unreal phenomenon of this world, we are able to do it.  There is always a way.  When I was younger, I was a bit reckless with my money (not unusual for early 20 somethings with a credit card).  I had a desire to travel, and in one year I’d gone to Las Vegas twice.  One of those trips was going to Hawaii and Vegas.  I can tell you it took me a really long time to pay off that trip, but I didn’t regret doing it.  There is nothing like experience.  I will always remember the feel of the water rushing up over my legs, the feel of the sand, sitting on Waikiki Beach, the feel of the sun on my back.  I’ll always remember the wild feeling of laying next to my then boyfriend in the hotel room bed after we had just made love.  Those are experiences that will always go beyond imagination.  That is life.  

In order to live life, we must live it.  There is no substitute for taking action on what we want and creating the life we have imagined in our minds from what we’ve seen on paper/TV/Social Media/online, and from what we’ve managed to put in our heads from desire.  We are infinitely more powerful than we could imagine.  The world is just waiting for us to harness that energy and make something of it.  We wouldn’t have these desires if we weren’t meant to do something with them.  It would be like capping the volcano, trying to hold in all of that power while it’s bubbling and brewing and building pressure.  But we don’t need to wait to explode to get the life we want.  And there is this: Just as we can’t build the life we want without actually living it, we can’t assume we understand anything on the level of another person who has gone through it—no matter what that is.  So if anything, remember how very lucky we are and how very fragile this life is.  Even with all of this power, we are still just a speck, a dot in space—perhaps so small we don’t even register as a dot.  But there are infinite depths in us just like there are to the universe, the seen and the unseen.  All of that insignificance doesn’t matter—it’s a reminder to take what we have and go live the life on the grandest scale we can.