Perhaps there is a little more to lottery fever than meets the eye………..
On Sunday night we had a family dinner in the West Village. Inspired by the burgeoning lottery prize for the Powerball to record proportions, we jovially went around the table and said what we would do if we ever won. It was an interesting exercise. I was especially curious to see what my kids would say. I got to wondering – was there a message here?
Now, of course, the odds of winning the lottery are comical at best. But, like everyone else, there is something somehow inspiring about the remote of remotest possibilities, even one this fantastically remote. Afterward I found myself thinking of the irony of the exercise. The “what would you do?” is a powerful question………
Here we were listing out our dreams in the context of “if only I had the chance”. Today is Tuesday and as my husband left for the airport, I called to him, “Don’t forget to buy lottery tickets!” The door closed behind him and I found myself with a flood of thoughts coming in. Mostly, it was “why do we need the thought of winning the lottery to bring forward a list of things we really want to do?” It’s curious.
Is is true that behind the possibility of every single person’s winning ticket is the dream of doing something different? What does this say about the lives we live? Are we prisoners of ourselves on some level? Has fate taken us in a direction that is the polar opposite or some sliver of our true dreams?
We all spoke of our own special wishes for charitable endeavors and giving loved ones a gift. We talked about going off to remote islands and basking in the sun. But behind the exercise was a valuable question – what lies behind what we actually do every day that holds the key to what we really wish to be doing with ourselves…… And, why aren’t we doing it? Completely impractical! Pie in the Sky! are the first answers that comes to mind. But, really? I got to thinking if there wasn’t something really here.
Why do we need the tease of the lottery to bring the answer to this question forward into our consciousness? When someone asks you this question, how far back into the depths of your soul do you have to go to find the expressions of what you really want to do with yourself? Some of us may not even be aware of what these things are. And, most profoundly, the question becomes, why aren’t you doing these things? How far away from our reality are they?
Of course the silliness of buying a private plane and living on an island with all of the free time and no pressure and thoughts of unlimited relaxation is really nice. But, is this really what we want? I think not. Perhaps for a few weeks we’d loll around in a bathing suit, maybe even learn how to sail and then what? Not many of us would truly be happy living a life of simple unadulterated indulgence. No, I suspect that after not that much time a rolling ball of boredom would beset us and we’d start getting itchy and antsy. And then we’d go back……..
The purpose of this post, of course, is to ponder the question of how and why we get so far away from what we truly desire to do. I’m of course not kidding myself that we all have things to do that are not necessarily negotiable. But for the chosen avenues of our lives we sometimes get far away. We pick up little signals about what the outside world tells us we should be doing and leave that little list of dreams in the dust somewhere. Some of us are lucky enough to have some free time to indulge in what we truly love to do. And, a mixture of the non-negotiables and the dreamy stuff is kind of a nice option. But for those of us who don’t know the answer to “what would you do” and spend our days and years floating along in a life filled with voids and not a whole lot of self-actualization, well maybe a little bit of lottery fever would do some good. Many would say this is a useless exercise that would result in nothing more than a huge amount of frustration.
I’m betting otherwise…….
