At the start of this year I was in a funk and looking for a job. Well, not necessarily a funk but a sort of state of career limbo. I had just come off of one of the best travel highs of my life, went back to Chicago, then back to Dublin to look for a job for a grueling three months. All of a sudden it clicks. It all finally falls into place and I’m offered a new job just as the social and economic structure of our world begins to deteriorate. But, I was still holding on to that hope of my new job bringing me some financial stability. And it turns out that this job is great and the people are even better. Maybe this was more than just money in my pocket. It was something I could build from.

Alas, reality hit once again and now I am told that I am redundant - no longer needed or useful; superfluous. I hate that word. It makes you feel exactly what it means. Now I am feeling a real impact of everything that’s going on in the world around me. I think a lot of people are. Despite all of this my creative juices are flowing once again and despite what’s coming I feel less anxious than I thought I would.

I am, by nature, a dreamer. I can’t help but imagine ideal situations and states of mind no matter how far out of reach. Some of these dreams I choose to act on and I may fail to reach them. Others I let sit idly by procrastinating until the right time reveals itself to me in order to put into place. Either way I think it’s these utopias, fantasies, adventures, and dreams that allow me to have hope that things can and will be better than they currently are.

I’ve been slowly disconnecting myself again from that 9 to 5 mentality and trying to focus on what makes me feel good, comfortable, and excited. Ideally, I would like to marry the two worlds of work and play and create a fulfilling life built around things I truly care about and look forward to doing every day regardless of what’s going on internally or externally. I finally started to organise my notes, ideas, and rambles into one document which I think will eventually lead to something amazing and reveal my underlying motivator.

I found this note I wrote to myself on the night before Christmas Eve sitting in a hostel in Vienna waiting for my connecting flight the next morning:

“Is it strange that something that brings me the most peace and joy is traveling and ending up in a city completely alone not knowing a single soul? The process of getting on a flight and digging deep into my book, writing, watching movies. Then getting off in a foreign land and figuring out how to get to your hostel at the darkest hours of the night brings me pure unobstructed peace.”

Those are the type of moments when my mind wanders and creates and there is so much hope for everything. Absolutely anything is possible. And it still is despite the changes we are seeing all around us. This is the perfect time to come up with solutions to current or foreseeable problems. They don’t have to be life-changing, just different.

The lesson I am trying to teach myself is to never stop dreaming. These “random” dreams, thoughts, and ideas when organised make a lot of sense to me. I just need to dig a little bit deeper to turn those dreams into reality.