would you rather

Once upon a time, playing the "would you rather" game, I was asked a question for which I have yet to decide my final answer. The question was as follows:

Would you rather have a happily ordinary life

or be miserable but extraordinary?

Initially, my response was definite and immediate. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to be someone, to do great things, regardless of what that might mean to my personal happiness. I felt that living in contentment meant living in complacency, settling into dreary boredom.

Then, life as I knew it completely disintegrated, and I longed for nothing more than simple, ordinary, everyday moments.
Forget fame and fortune. Forget power and prestige.
I wanted to love and be loved at a very basic level, extraordinariness be damned.

Now? Well. I mean, I know it's the "would you rather" game and all, but can't there be just a little bit of both?
Can't I be happy and be extraordinary?
Why must it be one or the other?

I have always dreamed big.

My three lifetime goals, from childhood on:

1. Be on the stage. Broadway, London's West End, Stratford, Shaw.

2. Record an album. Original music, of course.

3. Write a novel. Or publish a book of short stories.

Some things just don't change. I sit at my desk every day in the highfalutin world of corporate finance, all-purpose office gopher, wondering if this is it. Wondering if the dreams I have will ever fully be realized. I get closer daily (to one of them, at least) and yet self-doubt is such a huge enemy. A colossal enemy.

Still, deep down stirs my ambition. I shy away from the word, but I am ambitious. I want to achieve things. I don't want to just go to work to pay the bills, do a job I despise for decades of my life because it's what you have to do. (That said, I would also love to be able to achieve things and still have a happy marriage, a happy home. Thank goodness that J. feels similarly, that he's definitely not content with mediocrity but longs to succeed himself.)

ambition

(noun)

1 : a) an ardent desire for rank, fame or power

b) desire to achieve a particular end

2 : the object of ambition

3 : a desire for activity or exertion

(from Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary)

Recently I've been listening often and on repeat to the British band Doves (thanks, Ben). So many of their songs resonate somewhere deep within me, lyrically, musically, melodically. I was mulling over the lyrics to the final track off their 2005 release, Some Cities, entitled, appropriately, Ambition.

So ambition cut you down
Ain't a love as perfect
Everybody knows it
Something drove you down

Something as good
Something new
Somebody good
Our ambition cuts you down

There's not a love that's perfect
But I; I live in hope

Something good
Somebody new
Something as good
Something that's mine

Ain't a love that's perfect
Everybody knows it
Ambition cuts us down

Ambition,
Doves

Once upon a time, in my naive, fearless youth, I believed in perfection. I believed in uncompromised ambition. I believed in absolutes. I believed that in love, in life, in my sky-high dreams, I could and would unquestionably achieve extraordinary things.

As the sky came falling down, so did the dreams; but perseverance has picked me back up and slowly I have begun to put the pieces of those shattered dreams back together. Like helium balloons, they are floating once more towards the sky.

Once again, I want more. I want better.
I want the greener grass I longed for.
I want extraordinarily ambitious happiness.

And what's not to say that I can't have it? As we fell asleep last night, limbs tangled together, J. whispered in my ear that he feels I'm on the verge of breakthrough. How much those words mean as I dare to hope again. As I learn that love isn't perfect, yet is more precious for its imperfections; that uncompromised ambition can be unhealthy, can cut to the core, but that in losing it entirely, I was losing myself. Now, I am rediscovering myself.

Happy heart and home? Check.

Daring to dream again? Check.

Ambition achieved?