Following your dreams

More about working.
Let's face it, it's a huge thing in all our lives. Most our waking hours are spent there. Or not.
When I didn't have to work yesterday after all, but I was in the West End of London, and not a shopper, I ended up catching an early matinee of "Up in the Air," with George Clooney. You've probably all seen it. I hadn't yet.
What really stayed with me about that film was not Clooney, who's gotten an Academy Award nomination for his role, but all the people he fired.
The 57-year-old guy with the big pot-belly who just cried and cried at the loss of his long-held job.
The woman who asked what she would do with herself every morning from there on.
The man who pulled out the pictures of his young children and asked how he would tell them.
The woman who jumped off the bridge -- and changed the story of the movie.
Work.
Ohmigod.
What a powerful force in our lives.
I understood exactly what those people felt.
But wait. I didn't get laid off.
I took a paid buy-out.
To start a new life. In Europe.
And I've gotten some work here, although not full-time.
But still. I related to all those characters.
Because I too, left that cocoon, that all-encompassing, no-time-for-anything-else life that is working full-time.
You don't have to think about your life when you're working. Because that is your life. With just a bit of time squeezed in for other things.
Mind you, you resent that robbing of your time terribly. You yearn like hell for more time.
But still.
It stops you from having to fill your time with anything else. To find, maybe, that your dreams are too hard -- or silly in some way -- to follow.
In the film, Clooney and his young colleague tell the people they're firing that great people have been precisely where they are now, at the bottom the implication is, but have done amazing things from there.
You can finally follow your dreams, they tell the devastated employee. Remember what your dreams were when you were in your early twenties? Time to go follow them.
Sounds great. The kind of thing life coaches, self-help books, shrinks -- and people who are firing you -- tell you.
And the kind of thing we all tell ourselves. All the time.
I'm gonna stick my neck out here.
Working's easier.