Are you living a pro-active life?

So after posting yesterday about deprivational stress, I started thinking about other forms of stress.  I have been reading a lot of blogs lately and several this week have addressed similar topics such as creating your right priorities, ensuring to live the life you want - not simply existing day to day, setting goals for life (not only professional goals), and then the Bucket List came on and I took it all as a sign. 

Do we float along day to day merely existing like cows in the pasture?  Are we really taking charge of our own lives and living each day fully?  Are we taking pro-active steps to making our hopes and dreams come true? 

I look around me and I would have to say the resounding answer is NO!

Why do we allow this to happen?  At 17 I was so positive I would write for and eventually run the Wall Street Journal as a world known journalist.  At 30 I was positive I would be moving forward in instruction and instructional design.  By 35 all I could foresee in my future was management and leading others into the future.  At 41 I sit here, honestly, a bit clueless.

I look around and see many others surrounding me who, similarly to me, have allowed life circumstances to change their goals, hopes and dreams.  So many simply have a goal of having enough money to pay for gas until payday! 

How did this happen?  At what point in life did we all stop taking the bull by the horns and rather start following the plodded path to the feed barrel like so many others?  All the creativity sucked out of our souls, content to exist - well in some cases hoping and praying to continue to exist rather than living the lives that dreams are made of. 

I then read about a person who worked with terminal cancer patients and asked them what they regretted and each of them had answered their greatest regret was stressing over the small stuff.  WOW!  I think about recently being asked about my perspective on disagreements and how I answered, "Before getting upset about anything, I ask myself, in 5 years is it going to matter?"  If the answer is no, then I now simply choose to walk away and take another path.

Which leads me to perhaps the most important question - how do we get back to pursuing our hopes and dreams?   Am I going to be content following the easy road?  Do I even have a choice at this point? 

How am I going to make sure that don't look back and see only a life that I regret rather than a life that was lived to it's fullest?  How are you going to make sure you don't have regrets?

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,

but the number of moments that take our breath away."