It’s been a year since we set out to live for our dreams. Our project has been to dare each other to do all those things we’ve always wanted to do but somehow couldn’t find the courage, the money, the time for. We gave each other and ourselves a year with the idea that we could probably do just about anything we set our minds to for a limited duration.

We started by plotting out a series of adventures, and pushed each other out the door to experience them. Wendy went to India. I started flying lessons. We made friends and made music. We clutterbusted, loved, meditated, traveled, played, and then the most amazing thing of all began to happen. We opened ourselves to new possibilities.

We found that by giving each other license to live more fully, starting in specific, well-defined ways, we set ourselves free in spirit as well as in body, opening ourselves to opportunities that we couldn’t have imagined in advance. No longer confined by our perceived limitations, we we began to feel a strong sense of abundance in our lives that wasn’t related to the size of our bank account. We began to live each day with a renewed sense of adventure, and increasingly to let go of plans to allow the unexpected to happen.

Our last great adventure of the year was to travel to the Caribbean as a family. We enjoyed bright sunshine and warm water for a December week completely disconnected from the Internet, with our computers left at home and our iPhones locked away. Without the distractions of work, school, household chores, and electronic media, we had the time and the space to reconnect with each other in beautiful surroundings, with lasting results. We’ll be back next year.

We’ll return to other adventures we began in 2011 as well. I’ll take another retreat, though likely not to meditate this time; next time I put my life on pause I want to finish a novel. Wendy will return to Asia, but this time I’ll come along. We’ll hit Singapore first, and then probably Bali. We’ll keep paring down the clutter in our lives, leaving only what’s important, which continues to be each other, our dreams, and the things that bring us and those around us joy. The space in our lives is there, and the opportunity, to live adventurously for the rest of our lives, thanks to our year of living for our dreams.

What will you do in 2012? Where will you go?

When you set out to live for your dreams, sooner or later, you run up against one inescapable fact: unless you’re independently wealthy, most of your available time is taken up with earning money. And unless you love what you for for a living, how can you be said to be living for your dreams?

This month I chose work for my focus as Wendy and I continue our year of living boldly project.

The shaky state of the economy makes this especially scary, but I’ve determined to let go of work that doesn’t feed my soul. Instead I’m loading up on the work I do enjoy.

Freelancing as I do makes this process easier than being captive in a “real job,” but I think anyone can benefit from asking themselves the questions I’ve been living with this month:

-What do I want to be doing most of my waking hours?

-Does the work I do feed my soul as well as put food on the table?

-Can I replace income from work I don’t like with something else?

-Will what I’m doing lead to interesting/exciting/fulfilling work down the road?

-Does my work benefit others?

Which is why I’m riding on a starship right now instead of writing junk mail.

You can see my reports from the starship on my other blog at http://michaelbelfiore.com/category/blog and at http://popularmechanics.com.

Engage!

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” – Goethe

Many years ago I put these words on my college application, alongside a pencil drawing of an open hand that was not half bad. I chose my school, Vassar College, in no small part because I fell in love with an amazing tree that defied gravity to stretch a single solid limb across the lawn in front of the amazing, cathedral-like library. I spent a lot of time in that library.

Now the quote comes back to me with all the force of its exhortation. All year long, this Party of 4 project has incited my family to live with Goethe’s brand of boldness. It’s not easy to maintain that, but we’ve accomplished a lot. A trip to India. Flying lessons. Ten days of life-changing meditation. But round about midsummer we lost a bit of momentum, or at least, I did. My guitar teacher moved to Colorado. A nationwide franchise took over Michael’s flight school. Our finances were feeling the pinch of my India trip.

To get back the spark, I feel it’s time to revisit our original plan and make a few changes. The blogging diva Gwen Bell creates a “life list” of sorts every year, and then around midyear she revisits and revises it. I think this is wise, because we are not the same people we were in January, or even last week. We’re always changing, and this is a good thing. It’s a sign that life, energy, and the creative spirit are flourishing within us.

So I’m reevaluating. I’m letting go of a couple of the dreams that feel too much like type-A deadlines to me. Learning French, for one. This just might not be the year for that one, and I can let that balloon go. Instead of pressured goals, I’m opting for experiential dreams. I have discovered that I simply do not need one more item on my to-do list.

So my family has replaced French lessons for now with a plan to unplug together in a beautiful and inspiring place (I’m rooting for an obscure Caribbean island, or off-the-path Mexico). And above all these past couple of months, we’ve realized that feeding our creative spirits is as essential to us as food and sleep. Michael and I have both rededicated ourselves to creative writing–yet without those type-A demands and pressurized goals. It’s about creative play, and we’re taking cues from our 6-year-old, who is amazingly adept at this art. Now I’m writing poems again, Michael is back to penning his children’s book, and we’re both loving the process, the experience of creating itself, for its own sake.

Letting a dream go can feel just as bold and exciting as setting one into motion. Try it: Take a look at your life list. What can you edit out? What can you put in its place that really captures who you are right now, fully engaged in the intoxicating flux and flow that is life on Earth?

That’s what our house looks like inside at night. Yes, that’s an actual photo.

We’re five days since Hurricane Irene without power or water. I’m not complaining; other communities have it much worse.

Instead, we’re finding things to celebrate, like our neighbor’s brush-clearing bonfire. Last night I picked up some smoors fixings, Amelie got into her best party dress, and I took the kids over for a marshmallow roast. Then we told stories by the fire, with Amelie piping up most of all.

No way that would have happened if the TV and our computers still had power. Hopefully the beneficial effects of unplugging will last after power is restored.

Try it: turn out the lights. Start a fire or light a candle. Listen to what everyone has to say.

I decided to take Amelie to the county fair. Unfortunately the folks running the place were shutting it down. Hell, I thought, there’s a full day left before the end of the world, why end the fun prematurely? I squinted up at a glowering sky. It hadn’t even started raining yet. Amelie was howling with disappointment.

So I took her out for pancakes. See below as she demonstrates proper pancake-eating form. She had a stomachache afterward, but it was worth it. Just the sight of those pancakes and that pastry cheered her right up. This, I thought, this is how to spend the day before the end of the world.

We shopped for toys and books, and then we hit the movies with popcorn and ice cream and then took a turn on some coin op rides at the mall. Rain was spitting down on us as we left, but we were feeling no pain by then.

Amelie demonstrates the proper way to eat pancakes. Don't forget to drink your syrup.

The wind tore down some tree limbs in our yard during the night, but thankfully did no further damage. The power went out throughout our town around five in the morning. We got a flat tire driving through the debris-filled streets after daybreak.

Three days without power, running water, or a flushing toilet have tested our patience, but I keep thinking of those pancakes and Amelie’s delighted laugh as she hoisted that mug of maple syrup, the first-grader’s ale.

By this morning, power had been restored to the town, thanks to help from utility workers imported from Kansas (I felt like cheering when their trucks rolled in like the tanks of a liberating army). We still can’t flush the toilet at home or take a shower, but at least now we can work at our office. We’re back in business. I have a backlog of work to do, but I’m writing this post instead.

How would you spend the day before the end of the world?

Fireworks in Woodstock. Yes, they do them in August here, just to be different.

When I was a kid, I frequently had the urge to “make something cool.” But my model airplanes and ships never came out right. The glue smeared, the paint showed finger prints, the masts and propellers tilted at crazy angles.

There was a kid at my school who made his own tusken raider costume, inspired by the just-released first Star Wars movie. The mask was a rendition of the buck-toothed beast done in papier mache, complete with red light-up eyes. It was beautiful, flawless, untouchable.

I wasn’t a maker, I realized. People who were seemed like magicians to me. Still do, and that’s why I’ve made a career of writing about them.

But what to do with that urge to create? As a boy I read constantly, while walking to and from school, in bed at night, every chance I got. Novels, comic books, nonfiction books, it was all cool. Entire worlds held together with stables and glue between colorful covers. I wanted to make my own worlds, and to my great satisfaction, I found that I could. I taught myself to touch type on an old manual typewriter when I was eight. One of my first stories was a humorous alien invasion tale called “The Coming of the Goozer.”

Now, as an adult, even though I’ve made writing my living, there lingers still that urge to make something cool. I love writing about other people’s cool projects. But I still want to make one of my own.

This month, Wendy and I are focusing on creativity as part of our live-for-our-dreams project. I’ve picked up the threads of a kid’s science fiction series I started years ago and haven’t found the time to finish in the midst of big people’s deadlines. Yesterday, while immersed in my story of time-traveling trains, I had a breakthrough when starship appeared on the outer fringes of the solar system and homed in on our rocky little planet. It all makes sense now, who built the time traveling trains, and why. Wendy’s been working on the poetry that she loves and that has similarly been pushed aside over the years.

I believe we all need our own cool projects to work on. Something to lose ourselves in, something no one else need even know about. Maybe its a garden. Perhaps some metal and wood contraption in the basement. Or a knitted sweater or just a perfectly executed vacation. Don’t call it a hobby; that’s an ugly, demeaning word. Instead call it soul work, as opposed to money work. The creative spark resides within all of us. The only question is, what to do about it.

What’s your cool project? If you don’t have one going, what would you like to start, and what excites you about it? Post a comment to share.

The first recession blew away our savings and knocked down our income. I don’t know what a second shot would do to us.

But the choice of actors playing roles in my dream is telling. On some level economics is all a game of pretend. Certainly our esteemed leaders in Congress seem to think so. And, too, I was an actor early in my life, once upon a time with a lot of promise.

This is what a midlife crisis feels like: you’re halfway up a big tree, and you can’t help but look down.

Wendy and I started our year-of-living-adventurously project with the lessons of the Great Recession fresh in our minds: that what really matters are not our material possessions, but each other and our girls. We set out to discover what else was truly important to us, and our lives have been improving in countless ways.

And yet everything we do seems to depend on money. Money equals time equals freedom. I had intended to write a post on how we’re now boldly charting a course away from our monkey work jobs and into more of the work we find fulfilling. But now fears of another recession have me thinking more  about surviving than thriving.

And yet, what really matters shines through: a few minutes alone with Wendy while the girls sleep later than usual; the smoothness of Jade’s cheek as I kiss her and tell her I love her; her squeals of delight as I push her in a shopping cart as fast as I dare up and down the aisles of a store; Amelie’s delightfully musical laugh when something strikes her as funny. Fear may drive me from bed in the night, but these are the things that keep me going through the day; these are the things that matter.

Are those downward plunging graphs in the news keeping you up at night too? In times of crisis where do you turn for solace?

My instructor had me taxi down runway 15 at Kingston Airport and lift us up into the air at 60 knots to sail over the Kingston-Rhinebeck bridge, and head north along the Hudson.

I practiced some turns before heading us west, back across the river and to the Catskill Mountains. Then we truly entered another world. Greg had me fly through a mountain pass to gaze down on a verdant valley below. Out we flew through another pass, and then headed south around the curve of the mountains to overfly Woodstock, my home.

Reality began to set in when Greg demoed proper turns, banking us at 45 degrees, left and right, and back again repeatedly, until I felt rather airsick. My turns were decidedly sloppier, and much less steeply banked.

The illusion was broken. I was no flier, just a dreamer sitting in my queasiness. “I’ll bring us in gently,” said Greg. Back on the ground, Greg told me he was getting laid off as another company bought the flight school. He told me not to be discouraged. I presented a credit card at the front desk to pay for my $213 lesson, keenly aware of the expense as an added weight to the burden already on that card.

Past the halfway point of our year-of-living-adventurously project, Wendy and I are dragging the ground. We’re still paying off that trip to India. Continuing flight lessons are an unaffordable luxury. Hours to meditate or practice guitar turn out to be equally unaffordable expenditures of time.

Money is fuel in the tanks. Time is altitude to maneuver. Like millions of others, especially these days, we’re short on both. But we’ve seen life at 3,500 feet. We know what’s important to us and what isn’t, what’s worth working for and what’s not. For starters, we need to spend less time earning more money. I have some ideas for doing that.

What’s holding you back from living your dreams? What can you do about? Leave us a comment to share your ideas.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what makes flight so compelling to me. Now, after my introductory lesson at Kingston Airport, I think I’ve got it.

It’s a matter of perspective. Even here in the country, we’re surrounded by people. Scrabbling around on the ground, we have to make way for each other, go around obstacles, never seeing beyond the next hill or corner. It’s life in 2D. We live that way our whole lives, and we’re used to it.

But when you climb into the cockpit of an airplane, you leave all that behind. After a running start, you leap into the sky, and suddenly you’re living in 3 dimensions.

When my instructor and I took off, we had the sky to ourselves. There were no stop signs, traffic lights, no traffic at all, no obstacles to where we could go, not even a cop to tell us to slow down or signal our turns. We were free. Free to move up or down as well as left and right. Free to turn, bank, or climb or descend as we pleased.

The Hudson river flowed below us, wide and mighty, no more just an expanse to cross, but a gently curving length, whole and majestic, like the mountains to the west. The treetops covered the now-irrelevant roads. The city of Kingston glittered, sharp edged in the sunlight. “I don’t care how fast a Ferrari is,” remarked my instructor, “the fastest way from point A to point B is a straight line.”

And then there’s the landing, as much a miracle as flight itself. Working throttle, flaps, rudder, and ailerons, Greg slowed us so that we floated down to kiss the runway so gently I hardly felt it, and we were rolling in 2D again. “Hello, Mother Nature,” he said, with evident satisfaction. Because as transcendant as flight is, a safe return home is never to be taken for granted.

Needless to say, I’m hooked.

Turns out you don’t actually need a cord dangling out of your head to turn off the outside world and do away with all those pesky human interactions like paying attention to your kids or playing with your sibling. Any old device with a screen will do just fine.

Last weekend we stayed near the beach in Rockport, MA, courtesy of homeexchange.com. We hunted for shells and beach glass, spent time with friends, and explored a new town. We still had our devices with us, but their hold on us was loosened. We connected more with each other, and we thought about possibilities.

Now we’re plotting our escape to somewhere with no cell phone coverage, no Internet access, and no TV. Somewhere inspiring, somewhere warm in winter, somewhere to get tune with each other. Then, when we get home, we’ll put the TV in storage and leave our smart phones and computers at the office for a while and see how that goes.

Have digital devices begun to take over your life? Do you have a place to go to unplug? Share your thoughts in the comments section.