The Last Piece Of Advice
I’m sorry for missing Monday’s blog post. The day I had planned didn’t quite work out, and I decided to skip it. It’s 100% my fault. I could have made it work, but I didn’t. But that’s okay; we make mistakes and then get back up on the horse. I may be one day further from my dream than I could have been, but I can make it up, and it’s never too late to start again.
I’ve had a lot happen over the last week or so, and I want to talk about all of it because it all matters for our dreams. So let’s start at the beginning of this week of realizations, at the AJR concert I attended. I already told you that that experience was a dream come true, but along with that moment, I also learned things.
AJR is a band of three brothers, and throughout the process of writing their most recent album, their dad got sick and ultimately died. Their dad was truly their biggest fan and supporter of their music dream. When they shared this dream as children, he moved them to New York City so that they could start street performing and making the connections they would need for success.
The song, God is Really Real, shares part of their story with their dad. The entirety of The Maybe Man arena tour was a tribute to their dad. They shared that they were laughing and sharing stories in his room on the last day of his life. They asked him for his one piece of advice. He said something along the lines of “Life is too short not to be the biggest version of yourself, so go all out.”
I think we’ve all heard a similar thing as the last message from someone. Asking anyone someone on their deathbed what the point of life is or what they would do differently if they could do it all over again often gets some version of stop caring what people think and go after what you want. And if that’s the advice people share over and over, maybe we should start listening to it.
In the AJR song 2085, they sing, “And go tell your grandson to go tell his grandson, you don’t have to try so hard you know, cause I spent my whole life tryna be so liked, that only made ‘em hate me more.” People like people who are genuine. People like people who spew confidence because they are so fully themselves. People like finding people who are the same kind of weird as them. And if they don’t, does it really matter? I would give up being loved by all for being what they wanted me to be if I could have a few people love me for everything that I actually am.
Being unapologetically authentic isn’t easy, but it’s a skill we need to learn, especially if we are going to thrive in military life. Military life naturally builds in uniformity. There may be no consistency about what is actually going on, but there is a uniform to it. We know that deployments and PCSs are coming. We know the struggles of the people next to us because they face the same consequences of military life. We don’t know what the next change will be, but we can bet on the fact that it is coming.
Add in a few stereotypes that are more true than others, and we’ve got the uniform of military life. We may not have been given OCPs (or whatever the other branches use. I have no idea if names of uniforms are the same across the military), but we were certainly issued a uniform. Our service members can bring authenticity to their uniform through facial hair, nail polish, hairstyle, and tattoos or piercings (even if they have to be hidden away). The amount of personality a uniform can show may be minimal, but they find ways to stay themselves within the uniform.
We can do the same in ours by chasing our dreams. Life is way too short not to give it our all. There will be sacrifices that both we and our dreams have to make so that things work within military life. I’m still finding the balance in that as I add another facet of dream chasing to my life.
It starts with figuring out what “all out” would look like for our dreams. In an ideal world, what would we be doing day in and day out to make our dreams come true? Then, we figure out what works with military life and what doesn’t. We figure out what we are willing to compromise on and what we’ll never give up. We figure out how to make it work.
Just like we figure out how to survive a deployment, we can figure out how to chase our dreams. We do it because we don’t have a choice. We can either chase our dreams or live as a shell of the person we could be. It’s not much of a choice. In the same way that we can either miss our spouse when they are deployed or we can leave them? But if my goal is to have my husband home at night, only one option can get that back.
It may not be fair that we have to make compromises for military life. We may have to take more risks, or we may have to take less than we would want because of the situation we find ourselves in. Military life may force us to go at half the speed of what we are actually capable of, but the alternative is doing nothing.
I’m not big on not doing what I want. Going at half speed when I know I am capable of more is really frustrating. But I have more than one dream, and my dreams don’t exist in a vacuum. My husband and son are my dreams, too, which means taking into account their dreams. I have my dream come true with them. I will fight for other ones, but never at the cost of the ones I have. I’ll keep adjusting my plans to make everything work the best way I can. Living my biggest life means chasing my dreams wholeheartedly, at whatever speed I can, and knowing that going slower isn’t bad, especially if it preserves the other dreams in my life. One way or another, I will get to the end of my life, and I hope that I can share the same advice because I lived it.