I think that was spectacular & simple advice, Cary. We all want to do so many great things. If we want to do anything well, however--we have to pick one.

If you pick just one & do spectacularly with it, you'll get farther than most.

Dreams of grandeur are fun when you're a teenager, but very few people live grand lives and start revolutions. There is nobility in raising good humans for the next generation, and being a husband who makes his wife happy. You have a desire to express your highest nature, and you have translated that using big images from our culture and from literature --- but they are only symbols of what you really want.

If you are even sitting around thinking about whether you are one of that 0.00000000001% of people who will "change the world" in a headline-making fashion, then you are probably not one of them. There is absolutely not shame in that, and you already know what you're meant to do. You have a little bit of this world to fix and make better, and only you can do it, so throw yourself into it with abandon.

If I had to give one piece of advice to the LW in addition to Cary's excellent wisdom, it would be this: write. Whatever else you do to pursue your dreams, write about what you do and why you're doing it. Words and ideas have more power to change the world than any other force.

And as the earlier LW said, there is great honor and purpose in raising quality human beings. So many screw it up that to do it right is to unleash the means for glorious change upon this world.

Did you ever think that maybe you could change the world and fall asleep in the arms of a good woman, that they're not necessarily mutually exclusive? Why is it an either/or?

From The Myth of Er in "The Republic"

There he saw the soul which had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women, hating to be born of a woman because they had been his murderers; he beheld also the soul of Thamyras choosing the life of a nightingale; birds, on the other hand, like the swan and other musicians, wanting to be men. The soul which obtained the twentieth lot chose the life of a lion, and this was the soul of Ajax the son of Telamon, who would not be a man, remembering the injustice which was done him the judgment about the arms. The next was Agamemnon, who took the life of an eagle, because, like Ajax, he hated human nature by reason of his sufferings. About the middle came the lot of Atalanta; she, seeing the great fame of an athlete, was unable to resist the temptation: and after her there followed the soul of Epeus the son of Panopeus passing into the nature of a woman cunning in the arts; and far away among the last who chose, the soul of the jester Thersites was putting on the form of a monkey.

There came also the soul of Odysseus having yet to make a choice, and his lot happened to be the last of them all. Now the recollection of former tolls had disenchanted him of ambition, and he went about for a considerable time in search of the life of a private man who had no cares; he had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and had been neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it, he said that he would have done the had his lot been first instead of last, and that he was delighted to have it.

The full context can be found here: http://www.davidson.edu/academic/classics/neumann/CLA350/ErMyth.html

I still remember this passage from several years back when I read The Republic in school. It seemed relevant.

Dear L.W.:

I like part of Cary's advice: You should make a list of these dreams and get a little more specific with them. But let's face it--most of us are not destined to change the world.

In the song "Losing It", Rush says it quite eloquently:

"Some are born to move the world

To live their fantasies

But most of us just dream about

The things we'd like to be"

This might sound depressing, but the exciting thing is that we can ALL do something to accomplish at least a mini-version of our dreams. So I suggest that, for each of your dreams, you figure out a small, concrete step that you can take toward it.

For example:

Save lives --> Take a first-aid class.

Be a rock-star --> Take guitar lessons.

Befriend convicted murders --> Volunteer/teach at your local jail.

And see where these take you. You may end up dropping some of them, but if you can commit to even one or two of them, you will probably achieve something very worthwhile. And even the dropping of some of them will be useful, because you will have figured out that maybe that particular dream isn't as important to you as you thought it was.

And the simple act of accomplishing some of these mini-dreams will prove to you that you CAN do it. That will help you to break out of the frozen space of contemplation.

BTW, the advice I'm giving you has worked well for me. A few years ago, I had a dream of supporting myself as a writer. I decided that a step toward that would be to submit my writing to magazines for publication. After a year-and-a-half of rejections, I got my first publication, and then many more publications followed.

I still don't make a living as a writer, but I'm not sure I even want to now. Now I have the joy of getting my work published regularly, and that is plenty.

Good luck, fellow pilgrim.

That's plenty heroic enough.

"Saving one dog will not change the world, but for that one dog, the world will change forever"