Don Quixote As Prophet

Don Quixote tilting at windmills. I get my inspiration from the strangest of places. I was watching an episode of Bored to Death, which is a fantastic show. Hilarious. Do watch it, won't you?
Ted Danson was performing in a production of Man of La Mancha, playing the man himself. Strange mishaps resulted in him getting stoned and singing To Dream The Impossible Dream to his daughter, in full costume, outside her apartment window. All of that is irrelevant except for the song.
I have always loved the lyrics. A dreamer he was, Don Q, but he dreamed with every fiber of his being.
"To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go, to right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar, to try when your arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable star......."
2012 looms LARGE. It is right there. I can feel it, smell it, sense it, and soon I will be tasting it and seeing it. The 59th year of my life. And although the lyrics are dramatic, they really express what it takes to survive this bizarre existence we call life. I have felt these emotions acutely in 2011 because I awoke from a thirty year slumber to realize the only way I can change my life is to change my life. To make the effort, to put in the work, to try and fail, to try and succeed incrementally and to try again. To fight back doubt and fear, to ignore fatigue, to keep moving, doing, learning and fighting. To believe in myself and my goals, my family and friends, to accept my life for what it has been and to grab a hold of the damn thing and make it what I want it to be.
Giving up is not an option. If you are not dreaming the impossible dream, than you are gorging on Bugles and watching another inane episode of Survivor. Life beats you down, anesthetizes you, breaks your will, breeds hopelessness and kills hope. Everyone around you joins in because many of them have given up. You try to lose weight, they mock you. You say you want to earn more money, they sarcastically say "Good luck." You say you want your life to be meaningful, to bring you peace and pride, to be a work of art that you alone crafted and they ask "You want a single or a double?"
I accomplished very little in 2011. On the surface. Inside where my heart beats and my soul breathes, there is turmoil. I have shaken things up and my body is saying "what the hell is going on here"? My brain is thinking the unthinkable and sending new messages to the rest of my body, causing great confusion.
When you spend decades hiding from the world, hiding from yourself and killing pain, to suddenly step on the accelerator and fly from zero to sixty in 1/2 second, there are bound to be repercussions. The body has to adjust, the mind has to accept the new reality, the will has to act to continue forward motion.
My body has adjusted, my mind has accepted and my will has acted. I am driven to be a new man, reborn like Ebenezer Scrooge. I watched pieces of A Christmas Carol last night. When Scrooge finally gets it, he dances around and laughs and smiles, apologizes for his past stupidity and gives out love and understanding. And in so doing he makes himself, and maybe more importantly, other people happy.
I got a taste of that this year. A hint. I proved to myself that I can work hard and consistently, to keep moving forward, to fight through negativity (my own and that of others), to keep fighting. I have danced inwardly, and my heart has laughed,  my soul has smiled.
I am driven to be a new man, and it all started because I dared to dream the impossible dream, to try when my arms are too weary and to believe that I can reach the unreachable star.
Words can inspire you, words can change you, words can cut through the fog of a small life and show you unlimited possibility.
If you run into me and I am belting out The Impossible Dream at the top of my lungs, don't laugh. I may be on to something you don't even have the guts to consider.