- Henry David Thoreau
When she was five years old, Melanie Kinchen knew she wanted to be a doctor. When she was ten, an acquaintance of her mother asked Melanie if she knew what she wanted to do when she grew up. Melanie replied that she was going to go to an Ivy League university, become a doctor, and be the head of a clinic with “lots of people” working for her.
Twenty-five years later, Melanie’s mother ran into her old acquaintance, who cynically asked, “Whatever became of that odd child of yours?” Her mother stated that her “odd child” had gone to Yale, graduated from Harvard Medical School, did her residency and fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and now was a respected back surgeon and Director of the Spine Center at a highly regarded regional hospital. Melanie is singing her song just as she had laid it out years before. Thoreau would be proud of her.
Singing one’s song means being true to oneself, living a full, passionate, and authentic life. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said the goal of life is “to be that self which one truly is.” Finding your true song can be like peeling away the layers of an artichoke until the heart reveals itself. Your song may be buried deep under layers of pain, sorrow, discouragement, depression, anxiety, abuse, failure in the face of heightened (and unrealistic) expectations, lack of affection and support, or conditional or withheld love. As a person becomes clearer about who he or she really is, that person will be in a better position to decide what he or she wants out of life, what his or her song is and to begin singing it.
Often people follow their parents’ or someone else’s expectations as to their education and occupation, rather than discovering for themselves what really turns them on. The late psychologist Carl Rogers stated that people must move away from the person or direction they were told they ought to be or should go. Rogers found that many people put on a facade to try to please others, but when they were free, they moved away from being that person.
One of Rogers’s clients, looking back at some of the process he had been through, wrote, toward the end of therapy: “I finally felt that I simply had to begin doing what I wanted to do, not what I thought I should do, and regardless of what other people feel I should do. This is a complete reversal of my whole life. I’ve always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The hell with it! I think from now on I’m just going to be me — rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous.’”
Oprah Winfrey says that, “Your job is not just to do what your parents say, what your teachers say, what society says, but to figure out what your heart calling is and to be led by that.” Winfrey tells people to “[u]nderstand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege.” Meditation teacher and former Buddhist monk Jason Siff says, “You can’t really tell someone that this or that is something they should really do. It’s for each person to find his way to something that really suits and fulfills him.”
Singing your song is not about the amount of money you make or the material things you accumulate, the size of the house you buy with its Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis court, and horse stables, the price and speed capabilities of the car you drive, the make and vintage of the wine you drink, or the number of lovers you have had. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell said: “The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real estate, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.”
Singing your song can mean giving up a lavish lifestyle in favor of a lower paying yet emotionally satisfying life. Former President Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to public service, and with every nail he pounds in building a new home for an underprivileged family through Habitat for Humanity, he is truly singing his song.
Few have overcome as much adversity to sing her song as loud and clear as Oprah Winfrey. She was born to a poor single teenage mother in Mississippi and lived with her grandmother on a farm with no indoor plumbing. When she was 6, she moved to her mother’s home in Milwaukee, and a few years later to her father’s in Nashville. She was physically abused as a child and was raped when she was 9 years old. She gave birth to a son at 14, but he died a short time later. A voracious reader as a child—she started reading the Bible at 3— she wrote a note to her kindergarten teacher that she didn’t belong there, and was quickly put in the first grade. After the first grade, she was advanced to the third grade. A seventh-grade teacher noticed Oprah reading during lunch and managed to get her a scholarship to a better school.
With her winning personality and good looks, Oprah managed to win several beauty contests. But it was being crowned “Miss Fire Prevention” at 17 in Nashville that the tide turned. She was interviewed on a local radio show and for a lark was invited to read copy on the air and was hired to read the news. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Oprah says that she always knew that she was destined for success. And of singing one’s song, she says, “The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.”
Many people are afraid of singing their song out of a fear of failure. Dr. Wayne Dyer observes in his book The Sky’s the Limit that when we are young children we are not intimidated by making mistakes. Failure was nothing to be avoided or ashamed of, he states, but rather something to be welcomed because “you instinctively knew that you couldn’t learn anything unless you were willing to fail at it first. . . . If children were made in such a way that they were afraid to try new things because they feared failure, they would never get out of their cribs! Likewise, adults who fear failure simply vegetate.”
On the other hand, some people don’t risk singing their song out of the fear of success. In her book Overcoming the Fear of Success, Dr. Martha Friedman talks about the difference between external and internal success. External success consists of all the trappings of fortune, fame, power, prestige, and possessions. But without internal success, external success is hollow, leaving us unfulfilled and asking, “Is that all there is?” In Dr. Friedman’s words, “The sort of success I mean consists of this: getting to do what you really want to do in your work life and in your love life, doing it very well, and feeling good about yourself doing it. The fear of success is not getting what you really want because you unconsciously feel you don’t deserve it.”
Dr. Friedman sees the fear of success as a paradox: “On a conscious level, everyone wants to be successful. But on an unconscious level, it’s quite a different story. There, in the unconscious, is where many of us do our best, without realizing it, to ensure that success is never reached and, if it is, that it doesn’t last.” This concept is not new. Freud found that people occasionally fell ill precisely because a deeply seated and long cherished wish had been fulfilled. According to Freud, apparently “they could not endure their bliss, for the causative connection between this fulfillment and the falling ill there can be no question.”
One person who has had more than his share of success and failure is British billionaire entrepreneur and adventurer Sir Richard Branson. The “rebel billionaire” has been called the closest thing there is to a real James Bond. He presides over more than 200 companies and 50,000 employees, and now is working on Virgin Galactic, an airplane/spaceship that will take people into suborbital space, where they will experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the earth. Yet Branson has had to overcome his own difficulties, including mild dyslexia and a poor academic record. In fact, he dropped out of high school to start publishing a magazine, and the seeds of success were planted when he began a business of selling records.
But Branson is not all about business. He has risked life and limb in pursuit of various ventures, such as his several unsuccessful attempts to circumnavigate the world in a hot air balloon. Four times he has been forced to be pulled out of cold angry seas by rescue helicopters. But in the process of singing his song, Branson has set records for crossing the Atlantic in a boat in the fastest time and time and distance records for flying a hot air balloon across the Pacific. Branson says that, while the many businesses he has started play an important role in his life, “equally as important is my belief that every minute of every day should be lived as wholeheartedly as possible.” As for singing his song, Branson says: “Sometimes I wake up in the mornings and feel like I’ve just had the most incredible dream. I’ve just dreamt my life.”
Neil Young has been writing and singing songs since he was a teenager in the 1960s and has no thoughts of stopping. He doesn’t do it for the adulation of millions, once stating: “I don’t give a f*** if my audience is a hundred or a hundred million. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m convinced that what sells and what I do are two completely different things. If they meet, it’s a coincidence.”
Like his music, Young is always evolving. His parents divorced when he was ten, and some of the closest people to him have died from drug overdoses. Yet Young remains passionate about singing his song, metaphorically and literally. Young’s philosophy is best summed up in the name of his song Rust Never Sleeps.
Once you know your song, when are you going to start singing it? When you graduate from college? When you get married? When you have your first child? When your last child leaves home? When you turn a pivotal age, like 30, 40, or 50? When you retire? Emerson said that “we are always getting ready to live, but never living.” Dyer observes that “‘futurizing’ can become the most destructive of habits. The present is always used up in planning for the future, which never quite comes.” As John Lennon so eloquently put it, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”
Before you know it, there is little or no future left to sing your song. Or the unexpected gets in the way—a heart attack, a car accident, the birth of a child with a serious physical or mental defect. Life often does not turn out the way we hope or plan; every moment is precious.
The late psychologist Rollo May once had a client who stated that he knew only two things: one, that he would be dead someday, and, two, that he was not yet dead. The client said, “The only question is what shall I do between those two points.” The student would be well-advised to take author Henry James’s advice and “[l]ive all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”
8 TIPS TO LIVING YOUR DREAMS
1. Make Every Day Count. Dr. Teddy Blecher, co-founder of the Community and Individual Development Association (CIDA) City Campus in Johannesburg, South Africa, states that when you look back on your deathbed one day and ask, “Was it all worth it? Will you be able to say every day would have made it worth it?”
2 . Learn to Enjoy Life. 19th Century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon stated, “It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy that makes happiness.” The Talmud states that “everyone will be called to account for all the legitimate pleasures which he or she has failed to enjoy.”
3. Don’t Worry, Be Happy. His Holiness the Dalai Lama believes that the purpose of life “is to be happy. From the core of our being, we simply desire contentment.” Gandhi said, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
4. Stop and Smell the Roses. Famed University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that, “It really does not make sense to go through the motions of existence if one does not appreciate as much of it as possible.”
5. Live in the Moment and Be Aware. Eric Berne, M.D., the father of transactional analysis, said, “The aware person is alive because he knows how he feels, where he is and when it is. He knows that after he dies the trees will still be there, but he will not be there to look at them again, so he wants to see them now with as much poignancy as possible.”
6. Be Yourself. In Hamlet, Polonius exhorts, “This above all: to thine own self be true.”
7. Things Aren’t Important . . . Contemporary spiritual leader and author Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth, “Many people don’t realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they are. In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless.”
8. . . . Relationships Are. The Dalai Lama teaches that, “The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the interdependence we all share with one another. However capable and skillful an individual may be, left alone he or she will not survive.”