On Dreamshaping: Mission Accomplished

Mark McNease

I’m on a mission. How many times have we said this to ourselves? How many times have we told it to the people around us? Being on a mission is a way of focusing our attention and energy onto whatever that mission is. For a few people there may be one overriding mission in their lives—to be an actor, a writer, a doctor, the raiser of a family—but for most of us there are multiple missions that change over time. We may be on a mission to earn a degree during our college years, or to succeed without one. We may be on a mission to raise children, or to live our fullest lives without them. We may be on a mission to lose weight, or further our careers, or even to find the kind of inner peace that surrenders missions altogether! That’s a little closer to nirvana than I will likely ever come, so I accept that I have missions. The challenge is finding the best ways to pursue them.

It’s okay to have a goal, to see a particular destination in the distance that we work our way toward. A mission can be as narrow as arranging an event and having it go off to our satisfaction, or as wide and critical as surviving our formative years. I’ll admit I’d been on a mission to get through high school and leave the town I’d grown up in. It was among the most difficult missions of my life, but it is a mission accomplished. I made it. I thrived. I found other, less life-threatening missions to devote myself to.

Some of my missions have included: writing books, changing destructive habits, moving across the country more than once, embracing and cultivating a life in rural New Jersey where I now live. I’ve also been on missions to become a better person, to understand why I do what I do and think like I think, to reveal my shortcomings to myself and see what can be done to improve upon them.

I’ve been on a mission to write Dreamshaping for eighteen years. That sounds like a long time because it is! I first had the idea for this book, this project, when I was sitting on a beach on Long Island listening to the waves crash onto the shore. Eighteen years and dozens of halting attempts later, I am well along on this mission and I can see myself achieving it within the next year.

I’ll have new missions to pursue, including the mission of a fruitful and creative retirement from the kinds of work I’ve been doing all my adult life. I use the word ‘retirement’ sparingly  because it doesn’t mean what it once did in our culture. I have no intention of retiring, except as it means I won’t work for someone else much longer. That is my mission, and I’ll be accomplishing it by the time I celebrate this coming Christmas. A wonderful gift to myself, as well as a mission accomplished.

I’m not a proponent of deadlines, but I think it helps with missions to envision the ends of them, sometimes far away when the mission begins, and sometimes just up the road.  But every day I lace up my imaginary mission shoes, or put on my imaginary mission clothes, and recommit to any and all of the missions I’m on, it is a day I travel closer to completing them.

What are your missions? How dedicated to them are you? And how many of them in your life have you had the pleasure of seeing through? Think it over. You may be surprised at how “mission accomplished” you’ve always been.

You can listen to the Dreamshaping podcast HERE, short inspirational podcasts for anyone, anywhere.

Dreamshaping Copyright MadeMark Publishing