If we got everything we dreamed of, would life be truly a dream?

Imagine your perfect life is given to you, every last detail fulfilled. Are you a successful business man, or are you a farmer working in the grueling heat day in and day out? Are you a stay at home mom, with 3 kids and a house that needs to be cleaned, or are you a doctor, saving lives? Do you immediately think of how much easier your life would be if you had everything go as planned?

With the wisdom I've somehow gained at age twenty-two, I can tell you it would be amazing, for maybe at most a few weeks. Mostly all of society dreams about the day their children wake up happy, well fed, and can get dressed on their own. They head off to work in an exquisite car that gets double takes while driving down the interstate, leaving their gated-community home. Work goes smoothly, everyone works together flawlessly, and you come home to a warm, fresh dinner waiting for you with your family at the table. You're probably thinking, "How could this get old?". Well, easily.

Those goals that were attained were gained through years of hard work, studying, and setting a realistic approach to personal goals. If you woke up one sunny morning, with everything you dreamed of at the palm of your hands, a feeling of happiness would surely overcome you. But the feeling of internal gratitude would be missing. How can you be grateful for something you didn't earn? Happiness is easy to gain, but gratitude is not. Gratitude takes time, effort, and multiple failures. Failure is painful, and even pretty embarrassing at first. However, some of the most successful people take what they don't succeed in and apply the lessons learned to create something even better than before. If your children woke up one morning, needing no help from mom and dad, happiness would come easily because hey, who really wants to wake up early for their kids routine? Soon the happiness will fade and you'd realize that the path leading up to their independence was taken away from you. You missed out on getting to experience being a parent to a child who needed you, and you now have to live with the fact that that child no longer needs you the way you were needed yesterday. Having everything you've dreamed for is not a bad thing, so please don't think I'm bashing that idea. However, the path to your dreams is just as important, if not more, than the moment you realize you have it all. The days were you just wish your child was asleep, will become the days that you wish they would come home from deployment. The days you do a double-take on that beautiful Audi driving down the street, become the days were you wish you only had to spend 45 dollars for your old Chevrolet.

Enjoy the hardest parts of life, so when you can finally say you made it, you have a full sense of gratitude for everything you earned. That itself, will be more fulfilling than anything you imagined.