Connectedness

How am I connected to a bunch of homeless people, a hodge-podge of individuals thrown together in Nashville with a common reason that's different than mine?

At first, I had no idea.  But then, I started thinking about their reasons for coming:  to make it "big" in the music industry, to travel back home, to live their dream (whatever it may be).  Then I started thinking about my reasons for coming:  to escape a place I despised in hopes of finding a new home to call my own, to become the person I want to be, to live my big dream of being a dance therapist in a large city.

In some ways, the specifics of our reasons for coming to or staying in Nashville are different, but the purpose is the same:  we all just want what we want.  We want to be happy, have the career we desire most, make it "big" in our chosen field, and establish ourselves in a place, sometimes a new place, that we fit into and can call home.

So what makes them so different from me?  That question scares me, because the only thing that separates us is that they're farther along the road than I am.  What if I have bad luck in life, like they did?  What if my dreams don't come true?  What if I fail?  Many of the homeless in Nashville just had some bad luck happen in their life, whether it was that their dreams didn't come true, they couldn't get a job like they thought they would, or something drastic happened in their life to cause everything to come tumbling down.  Any of those things could very realistically happen to me.  But what would my reaction be?  The reaction of my homeless friends was to turn to alcohol and drugs to cope with the failure they'd become, or just keep trying for their dreams, extremely persistent, even with their guitars worn beyond good use.  Can I reasonably say that I wouldn't do those things?  That if my world, my "reasonable" dreams came crashing down, I would just accept it and keep on living life as if it hadn't affected me?  I can't say that I would.  I wish I could, but in many ways that also helps me connect with these people who are so different than me.  So really, we are all connected; in some ways I do understand them, the only difference is that my fears are their realities.

Maybe these people aren't so different from me.