Pay Attention To Your Daydreams

I’m a daydreamer. I always have been. I find so much contentment in visualizing scenarios. People laugh when I say that I could be fully comfortable sitting and staring at a wall, doing nothing. But I’m not really doing nothing. I’m telling myself stories. Sometimes my stories are realistic, and they play out in my real life. Sometimes they’re whacky and would never happen, yet I still enjoy playing them out. And sometimes they take a turn, and I need to stop before fully convincing myself that my boat (with its bone dry bilge) is, in fact, sinking.
This morning, after spending part of my morning sipping my coffee and daydreaming about my sail north a few months from now,  I began to answer the journal prompt “What do you want to pay attention to?” This prompt came from the book “How To Break Up With Your Phone” – which is a book I already highly recommend even though I’m only halfway through. 

As I was thinking and writing about what I want to pay attention to, I thought back to Austin Kleon’s book “Keep Going” where I first started thinking deeply about “attention”. 

He discusses the importance of your attention and how much your life is impacted by where you choose to point it. Kleon writes:

“If art begins with where we point our attention, a life is made out of paying attention to what we pay attention to. Set up a regular time to pay attention to what you’ve paid attention to. Reread your diary. Flip back through your sketchbook…Scroll through your camera roll. Rewatch footage you’ve filmed. Listen to music you’ve recorded…When you have a system for going back through your work, you can better see the bigger picture of what you’ve been up to, and what you should do next.”

Austin Kleon – Keep Going

What Kleon is describing can also be connected back to the famous Socrates quote “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Which brings me back to daydreams. 

There have been many times where I’ve internally scolded myself for not living enough “in the moment”. I’ve thought about how much I looked forward to the life I’m presently in, and how – now that I’m here – all I can think about is the next phase. And I do think there is a lot of validity in that; in our society it is not uncommon to see folks who are striving so hard for the future that they miss out on the present. 

But we can do both. We can enjoy and appreciate ‘here and now’ and we can visualize ‘there and then’. And we can pay attention to – we can examine – both. 

So now I’m going to go do some of that examination. I’ll leave you with a mini avalanche of questions that arise as I begin to explore, and I encourage you to use them to begin to explore for yourself. 

How does the season of life you’re currently in compare with the way that you daydreamed it to be? Are there beliefs that you’ve been holding onto that no longer align? That you should let go of? Are there beliefs that you once held that you want to bring back into your life? Perhaps you need to realign parts of your life to get yourself back in harmony with your values. 

What do you find yourself daydreaming about now? What do they tell you about the direction you should be taking your life? Are you taking steps to go in that direction? 

Perhaps examining your daydreams will tell you more about the “ocean” that you are longing for. Pay attention to that.