“Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die…Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.” – Goethe.

I have a friend – let’s call her Donna – who has a dream. She dreams of being a pub owner who sells specialty liquors. She has had this dream all of her life. But she was always told this was a pipe dream, not a career or a life, so she never followed the dream.

She did what she was supposed to do; she went to college, got a job, and earned a lot of money.

She worked in corporate America for 20 years and gave up because she hated the work and she disliked the people she worked for. She just couldn’t do it anymore; her soul was starving.

She said the corporate culture seemed creepy and greedy to her, she took no joy from her work and, increasingly, her life, But the dream never faded. Her heart raced when she thought of herself behind the barn, serving wonderful drinks.

She says she was often discouraged and unhappy in her office job and felt like a prisoner trapped in the life of everyone, including her parents, who told her what she should want, which would make her safe and secure. Everyone but her.

I rarely, if ever, read about this phenomenon, but I hear about it all the time from most of the people I meet.

I think it’s the big dirty secret of the Corporate Nation. The only people who want to be there are those at the top, and they never seem happy.

We are all brainwashed into doing work for other people, making money for them at the cost of our own life and ambitions. People tell me they can’t afford to. I wonder if they don’t have it backward. That’s the siren song: make money for us, be happy.

I’ve lived to see the Corporate idea devour or destroy or denigrate or corporatize every precious institution in my life – the media, publishing, job loyalty,  film and theater, the medical profession, sports, art, health care, our climate,  the animal world,  the woods, the American Dream, buying a starter home, higher education, and finally, work itself.

I kept running and running but finally ended up staring into a mirror, looking at my own face. I was out of places to run.

Like a great tsunami, greed has devoured almost everything people once loved and aspired to.

Its message has infected our culture: we live in a world that glorifies individualism and expects everyone to conform – in the things we wear, our goals and desires, and in life itself.

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else,” wrote e.e. Cummings.

I am proudest when someone tells me I am different. I am many unfortunate things, but conforming to the Good Housekeeping Life is not one of them.

Donna’s dream of the pub, the call to her heart, stayed with her, she said, locked inside.

After many years doing work she didn’t like,  she gathered her courage and will and quit her safe day job, and began planning for her pub when the pandemic hit

She had just decided to take the plunge and given up her well-paying “day job,” but the pandemic made it much too risky. She got a job as a shop manager but kept the flame burning in her heart.

Now, two years later, she’s thinking about her dream again and talks lovingly and knowledgeably about what it takes to open a pub and keep it running. This story struck a nerve with me, and we had a great time talking about it. If I prayed, I would pray for her. So I decided to pray for her to have her dream; it couldn’t do any harm.

How brave she is to try again.

I’m with Joseph Campbell. “Follow your bliss,” I said, and your calling might follow you.”

I know many people who conform. I know many people who don’t. Many have followed the heart’s call, and their dreams have come true. Some have failed.

I am one of those people who failed and failed and then tried one more time.

I was taught to conform and decided not to.

My very being rebelled against it. After many years of trying, I couldn’t do it anymore.

I left the cities where I had always lived. I left my familiar and all that was familiar. I got divorced, became my own kind of father and grandfather, and live on a farm in the country surrounded by people who are nothing like me, except many of them do follow their hearts and live the lives they chose.

I’ve never understood why everyone is trying so hard to be what everyone expects of them or why I tried so hard to be what everyone expected of me.

At some point in every day, whether in silence, contemplation, or meditation, I ask myself the same question: am I serving the real me or the false me, the true or the lost one? Am I living my true self?

I told Maria that if I died first, I wanted her to paint some of my proudest words on a canvas and fly them from a pole: “I was different.”

Godspeed to you, Donna; I hope to be one of your first customers when you open your pub.

I read a beautiful anthem for me in one of Joan Chittister’s books. “...at the end of the day, wherever we are, whatever we choose to do…the self is always the greatest strength, the greatest gift we have to give. If we do that, it is then that the call is heard, and the gift can be given.”

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“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same–everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same–people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.” – George Orwell.