An Unfinished Life

I can't believe I'm posting on How I Met Your Mother for the second time since the new season began, but can I help it if the show is awesome and totally relevant? Last night's episode was titled "Unfinished," and it was about stuff in one's life that's, you guessed it, unfinished: dreams not yet achieved, ambitions not yet met.

In this episode, all the major characters (with the exception of Barney) have loose ends and unfinished business: Robin's breakup with Don was too abrupt for closure, Lily regrets abandoning karate after one lesson, Marshall wishes he still gigged with his funky lawyer band, and Ted never achieved his lifelong dream of designing a building in New York.

However, when Ted gets a second chance at designing that building, he turns the opportunity down because of how stressful it would make his life. He says, "I have a quiet, simple, happy life, and I like it that way.... Letting go of that dream is the best thing I ever did. I'm happy and I'm not letting go of that." His friends try to convince him to go for it, to follow his dream. He resists and resists, but then his next seminar lecture is about Gaudi and how the church he designed in Barcelona remains forever unfinished--not because Gaudi gave up on his dream but because he was hit by a bus before he could complete his masterpiece.

Ted lectures his class about why dreams usually aren't realized: "Most of the time, it's too difficult, too expensive, too scary. It's only once you've stopped that you realize how hard it is to start again. So you force yourself not to want it. But it's always there. And until you finish it, it will always be...." and then he runs out of the classroom, finds Barney, and agrees to design the building after all.

When you're twenty, your whole life is ahead of you and the possibilities are endless. There's no reason to think your wildest dreams won't come true. But then life tends to get in the way: dreams can be hard to achieve, or really expensive, or terribly frightening. And so we put it off, we say we'll try again tomorrow. We don't give up on our dreams--heavens no!--we just put them aside for a while, take a breather and regroup, waiting for a time when it won't be quite as difficult, costly, or scary.

But then one day you wake up and "a while" has become ten years, twenty...and you aren't close to being the person you thought you'd be or living the life you thought you'd live. You realize it's too late to follow your dreams--you have too many responsibilities and people counting on you. Your life doesn't revolve around you anymore...you can't afford to be that selfish. So "you force yourself not to want it." You tell yourself you don't want it, you even believe you don't want it. But you do, you do want it. You are incomplete and your life is unfinished until you get it. What happens then?

The question is this: When is the not having it finally going to catch up to you and begin eating away at your insides until the pain is too much to bear?

And are you ready for what will happen when it does?