u2areloved

    

Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.  ~Marsha Norman     

  So I’m having a totally stressed out day and I can’t put my finger on the cause exactly.  I had the day off work, and enjoyed spending the afternoon with my little boy and my mom.   We even treated ourselves to a yummy lunch at the restaurant where my daughter works.  You know the kind, where the food is a Renoir painting that you’re almost sad to eat.  We got great service; she got a grandmother-sized tip, we had a nice meal, and everyone was happy.  I was.

      Until I got home that is.  That’s when a dark cloud rolled in.  Knowing the rest of the week I have to work and even a precious day off still involves laundry, dishes, bills, paperwork, email, organizing, grocery shopping, cleaning bathrooms.   It seems these chores that seemingly never end and never cross a finish line continuously plague me.   I so want to be grateful for the mundane moments of life, not just the magnificent ones.  I struggle with the repetitiveness of reality I guess.   What should be easy is hard because it endlessly repeats.

       So on dreary rainy days like today, all I really want is to go to my HAPPY PLACE.   I realize for everyone it’s different but for me, it really is being in a crowd at a U2 concert as close to the front as possible.   For folks that aren’t U2 fans or haven’t seen them in concert it’s nearly impossible to describe. 

      The only way I can describe it is a cross between a rock concert and a service in a beautiful cathedral, peppered with some mind-blowing technology.  Your eyes and ears are in sensory-heaven!  Everyone around you will seem like the happiest people on the planet.  That’s because they are!  At least, for the moment!

      People that are shy, people with bad singing voices and smiling bright faces will all sing and sound beautiful in unison.  It’s for one simple reason.  U2 simply puts on the best concert out there.  The band, the audience, and the music just kind of meld together into some kind of surreal atmosphere that can only be described as magic!  You WILL forget you ever had worries in the first place.   

       Perhaps the biggest take away lesson I learned from my three and only three U2 concerts is this:

I want to dream out loud!

     Yes, full-out dreaming out loud in Technicolor and 3D surround sound! 

      Here me right, this isn’t just, “Oh I have a fantasy that if life were perfect I’d (fill in the blank)”   No! Dreaming out loud requires a game plan, a plan that requires time, discipline, and action.

     The thing is we all work, and most of us if asked if we liked what we do would say, “Um, it’s okay” with as much enthusiasm as we can muster.  Remember, most jobs last for years, yes, decades even!  Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones and are exactly right where you should be and you wouldn’t change a thing.  If so, good for you, and keep doing what works for you.  Yet maybe you’ve got something scratching your brain that there is something more in the plans for you, but what exactly??.

Am I bugging you?  I don’t mean to bug ya!

   If you’re feeling any of the same symptoms, don’t panic.  It’s not necessarily a mid-life crisis.  It may just be the seeds of creativity or change are starting to bloom somewhere inside of you, and you’re desperately trying to find water.  

       Going to a U2 show under a U2 open sky will do this weird thing to you.  It will make you want to be more than you are.  It will make you want to get lost in the sound and come out with a need to do or create:

Take a paintbrush to canvass

Write words

Build something amazing

Take a picture like no one’s ever seen

Sculpt something with your hands

Run a marathon

Climb a mountain

See other people in other cultures and countries

Help another human in a way you’ve never done before

      What is your dream?  Are you working on it?  Even U2 started out as four young boys in Larry Mullen’s kitchen in Dublin after he put up a flyer looking to start a band.     The rest as they say is history.

      But it started with a dream—a  dream that the whole team worked at, honed their skills together and separately, studied, failed sometimes– but always with a refusal to quit, and a willingness and open mind to go in new directions, to follow where the Spirit leads.

       I say, leave fear behind, step into the sound, and go towards the light and then magnify all that is waiting for you to behold.  Go ahead; dream out loud!

 

You are invited to the Happy Place.  Enter here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJBjCHEd0Dw