Tag: dreams

300 Posts and Counting

My 300th post in a row today. Only 65 more to go to reach my goal of writing a daily blog post for a full year.

Starting out on March 14th of last year (2023 for any of you who are just shaking off the trauma of whatever last year was), I wondered what the year would bring when I started out. I wondered if my goal of writing a book would be enhanced by this discipline. I wondered what I would learn about life. I wondered what I would learn about myself.

I’ve learned a few things. Among them, I have valued the feedback and support of fellow travelers. People in my life who may have only known me superficially before have stuck with me. They’ve read my posts, liked them and made valuable comments. I am grateful for you Diane and Gary. And Katie, too.

I have connected with other blog authors who are doing their bit to share their voice and insights with the world. Eclectic and interesting.

I’ve gleaned a few faithful readers and commentators along the way. I’ve signed up for their blogs and have learned from and enjoyed their writing. Thank you, Frank and Tony and Patti and Mangus and Kris. I see you too, ThatScaredLittleGirl. If I’ve missed any other regulars, please forgive me.

In the past, I have both applauded and decried the onslaught of technology and the power it has over most of us today. I’m just waiting for the internet to crash one day to see what kind of blind panic that triggers across the world. I don’t really wish that to happen, but admit I find it a fascinating prospect to contemplate.

I have discovered the memoir I originally set out to write is not as compelling a goal for me as it once was. I believe I was driven by a need to be validated and to share my learnings and survival strategies from the challenges of my childhood. How I overcame those challenges might be of help to others facing the same situations, I believed.

Part of me still believes that. Yet my life has evolved from a “survivalist” mindset and into a place of stability and contentment. I don’t have the same fire in my belly as I once had to share the atrocities I suffered in my childhood with the world. My solutions of choice come out in my blog writing practice anyway.

My deep-seated beliefs in spirituality over religion, self-care, meditation, yoga, healthy eating all inform my daily writing. Love over hatred. Kindness and compassion as a starting point for any new connections with others. When others disappoint or hurt me, I simply withdraw. I now believe it is their loss as much as mine for what we might have co-created together.

Like a wise farmer, I need to choose where I sow my seeds and try to pick fertile and welcoming soil. I spent too many years not doing that and have the results (or lack thereof) to prove it. I quote the wisdom of the late Maya Angelou who said: “When people show you who they are, believe them … the first time.”

That is such an important and hard-won lesson. My late mother destroyed her life by ignoring this truth. When she met my father, he was a firmly established drunkard and womanizer with a hair trigger temper. My mother believed that her love would change him. If it were not so sad and the consequences so tragic, I would laugh at that presumption.

Her misguided belief underscores a fundamental learning we all eventually come to. We can’t change anyone. It is difficult enough to change ourselves. Any of you who have successfully quit drinking, smoking, overspending, procrastination or other self-sabotaging behaviors know that truth intimately.

I have learned the hard lesson that you cannot push a string. People are as they are as you meet them in the present moment. What you hope and dream they will become one day, may or may not happen. Deal with them in the present, not in the someday you imagine.

If the present person you encounter proves to be a bad fit with where you are in your evolution, the only solution may be to walk away. You may wish them love and healing.

You do not have to expose yourself to the threat of being pulled under or back into the undertow of their unsettled and unresolved issues. That’s their job, not yours.

That was a tough learning for me. We are all tightly sewed into fraught expectations around family and friend relationships. Abandoning them may be seen and felt as disinterest or cruelty.

In my life, I have made those choices as an action of self-care and, yes, an act of love. It is often only in solitude and isolation that people learn the lessons they need to learn in their life.

Like people we lose through death, they are not gone from us. They are simply elsewhere.

I have learned lots over these past 300 days. I have much more to learn. I will always have much more to learn. It is an immutable truth that the more we know, the less we know we know.

I’m closing in on the final leg of this one year marathon. At the moment, I have no idea whatsoever what I will do on the 366th day. Carry on with daily posts or change direction? I do know this for sure.

Writing is not just a vocation but an avocation. It is an exercise in exploring the depths of the soul and spirit as much as it is a tangible product that others can ingest and ponder. It has given structure to my days, even when some of those days were very rocky and unpredictable.

I am finding my voice. I know her better now. I feel there is still much more to learn. So we’ll see. As we used to say regularly in the news business, the outcome “remains to be seen.” At any rate, you can safely assume there will be one even if I don’t yet know what that will be.

Better Late Than Never

An interesting English language idiom.

I was traveling today so my blog post is late – but “better late than never” say I.

It’s been a recurring fact in my life. I got to do many things later in life than was “normal.”

A happy marriage, for example, which I presently enjoy. Late but the miracle is that it happened at all.

I went to law school much later than my peers did with recently graduated undergrad colleagues, but I did it. Better late than never.

It’s a useful phrase and philosophy. It is much too easy to give in to the perception that it is too late to try something new. Whether that is mountain climbing or a graduate degree or that year off you’ve been meaning to take since you started working decades ago. Or sailing the world.

Whatever it is, if you have a hankering to dust off a dream, go for it. Learn piano. Write a book (personally relevant). Start a blog. (also personally relevant). Travel to Machu Picchu (which good friends recently did with their adult kids). Learn to ballroom dance or take up oil painting.

Whatever you didn’t do when you wanted to do it because life was serious and you needed to settle down and be responsible.

I once had a boyfriend who wanted to change direction and ditch law school. He dreamt of opening a bar instead of taking the bar. But he became a corporate lawyer and life took off in that direction.

He’s retired now and I’ve often wondered if he ever took up that challenge. It would warm my soul to think he had.

I did some digging around on the interweb and found some other familiar examples of “better than never.” The examples should resonate with some of you.

—  The dress arrived after the dance but better late than never—I’ll wear it to the next event.

—  I handed in my term paper a day late, but it was better late than never because the teacher only marked it down one grade.

—  Our flight was delayed 5 hours but better late than never because they closed the airport after the plane departed.

—  We only arrived at the game at halftime but better late than never.

— Just come over now—it’s better late than never and Grandpa would really appreciate the effort.

—  We just received the report. We should have had it yesterday but it’s better late than never.

—  A: Sorry it took me a year to pay you back the $500 I borrowed. 
  B: Thanks, it’s better late than never.

—  Unfortunately, we arrived when dessert was being served but it was better late than never.

Synonyms

  • it’s high time
  • not a moment too soon

I’m sorry this post was so hideously late today. The vagaries of travel. But it’s been published before midnight. The daily writing streak of the past nine months is still unbroken.

Better late than never. 🙂

Sleepy Time

Writing Prompt: If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?

I’d hate it. I love sleep so much. More accurately, I love the rituals of getting ready to sleep. I love the warmth and coziness of settling in between the covers. I just love the feeling of becoming warm and drowsy and drifting off into sleep.

Settling into that netherworld between the world of being awake and sleeping is seductive. It might be some weird psychological undertone about returning to the womb. But likely not. I don’t have particularly strong memories of being in the womb and the thought doesn’t much appeal to me.

I also enjoy dreaming. I love the topsy-turviness of dreams and how sometimes they confuse the hell out of me. At other times, my dreams work out some strange plot line with people I know or knew well at one time. Those people might do something in a dream I could never imagine them doing in real life.

They might reveal a hidden talent. They might shout in public or otherwise speak up assertively when we know them as mostly shy and reserved in daily life. I am most intrigued by those dreams which feel so real I feel trapped in them.

They push me to frantically work out solutions in my head about how I am going to manage a situation. Only to wake up to find it was all an elaborate fiction that almost instantly disappears.

Those kind of dreams can shake me up. It is as if the veil between reality and whatever the dream-state is diaphanous and almost transparent. Where does that world go when we wake up? And why is it so hard to recall the details of our dreams?

I’ve tried dream journalling. It never quite catches the complexity and nuance that a dream scenario presents. I am sure that is partly because dreams can evoke a range of emotions while they are unfolding with speed and meaning and nuance that are difficult to capture on paper.

But if I really didn’t need sleep, what would I do with all the extra time? Likely, nothing. I would do a lot more of nothing. I would sit more often in a forest on chunks of soft moss. I would listen to the forest sounds. I would watch insects and small animals doing what insects and small animals habitually do. I would deeply breathe in the fresh air surrounding me.

I would do this in an effort to transition away from my very important, very urgent real-world demands. I am held in sway daily like most adults by financial, physical, people and environmental obligations. I would like to let go of a lot of these demands without the bottom falling out of my life.

It is a delusion to believe more time would help me get more on top of my responsibilities. I let go of that fantasy a long time ago. The most efficient among us get everything they need to do done in the time allotted.

I hate those people.

The fault, it would seem, might be in me.

So while it is that I must sleep to get through my days, I am not sure more time would change my life dramatically. I think the secret to making my life richer or more efficient or meaningful or whatever emotional state it is I am going for, must be accomplished within the time parameters I’ve been given.

That is both the tragedy and the beauty of life. Just like everyone else, I have to figure out what to do with the precious amount of time I’ve been given.

Think I’ll sleep on that tonight.

Selling Instant Happiness

The high road is always an option. Finding a way out of difficult circumstances may not be easy but it is available. Usually with hard work and commitment. But let’s not get carried away. Radical transformation of your life or person is not possible for everyone. If it is, it is rarely easy.

And not always logistically possible at a given point. I was a single parent. My options were limited. Every parents’ options are limited if they are serious about being good parents. Kids are a major and serious time suck.

It taxes my patience to watch the endless carousel of “better you, better life” salespeople online. What bothers me most is the “one size fits all” approach that most of them take. Or worse, the purveyors of instant, easy healing tell us “YOU TOO” can be whatever you want to be.

Seriously? Endless possibilities may be a great message for the young and unformed. Who wouldn’t want a fast and easy ticket to “instant fame, success, happiness and wealth”? The problem is, life doesn’t work that way.

The message that “good things take time” doesn’t seem to be delivered much these days. Maybe it is but is just isn’t getting through. How can it compete with the messages of the fast, easy and no-fail crowd?

The notion of taking life step by step seems old-fashioned and irrelevant today. The rules for building a life and a family and wealth have been shaken to the core. Everyone is looking for a shortcut or fast track. Because they have been repeatedly told and reassured it is out there.

I believe there is a rude and widespread awakening coming. Time runs out. Responsibilities and urgent demands – emotional, professional and financial – increase exponentially as we get older. Or they should. Life closes in.

If you are still working as an Instagram influencer in your late 40s without a family or assets or anything else to ground you, there is very likely some harsh reality ahead.

I get angry because so many are pushing a “bill of goods” at us. The consequence is that instead of setting and pursuing concrete goals for self-development and self-improvement, many opt to take a shortcut to their dreams. So what happens if those dreams of “easy, instant success” don’t pan out? What is Plan B? Your fallback? Does anyone even think like that any more?

Physics has immutable rules. Life has immutable rules. Consequences are real. Life is finite. I have apologized to myself for pursuing the path that most of my peers elected to follow, instead of the road less taken. My loss. I was only half-brave, half-confident, half-committed to my own happiness. I didn’t believe I deserved it.

I am now at a place where I realize I deserve happiness (aka peace of mind) and getting there is up to me. I recently did some stock-taking. The track record of my life is a little spotty but it held me together for as long as I needed it to.

So my rant (and this IS a rant) is this. The madness of the world today needs a major course correction or it needs to come to an end. The extreme disconnect from reality and sanity we are living through today is unsustainable. Sadly, it is usually catastrophe that brings us to a screeching halt.

Teasing out a human-focussed, self-directed life of your own choosing is a hard slog. But the formula is pretty easy. Put yourself at the center of any discussion about what happiness is and what you want your life to be. Steel yourself for pushback.

My idea of happiness is a life awash in books and flowers and great food and loving, lively relationships (well, maybe that is your idea of happiness and if so, email me). But that may not be yours.

And if it isn’t, then what is? Only you can answer that and it is the main question you must answer and frequently come back to. Set your path and life will cheer you on even as it is putting every imaginable challenge in your way. For some incomprehensible reason, that too is part of life’s rules.

You are the center of your own life. Examine your idea of what “selfish” really is because that is what they will call you.

Everyone else has an opinion of you that suits their own experience and agenda. It is up to you to establish the life and goals you want to pursue during your precious time on this planet. When you do, then be prepared to do whatever it takes to reach them.

Is your main life goal is attracting two million followers on TikTok and reaping the financial rewards well into your 50s and 60s? Are you 35 years old and setting out to give me financial advice that will “turn my life around”? Are you telling me what I did and didn’t do wrong in my life and what I should and shouldn’t have done?

If so, don’t bother to send me that email.

I can already tell you we have nothing in common.

Only As Old

These are not my words.

This is a cribbed Facebook post. Posted by Eden Lynn, a San Diego graphic designer. Who knows where she found it.

It’s a good one, I think, and a great reminder for those who might believe they can’t get there from here:

“At age 23, Tina Fey was working at a YMCA.

At age 23, Oprah was fired from her first reporting job.

At age 24, Stephen King was working as a janitor and living in a trailer.

At age 27, Vincent Van Gogh failed as a missionary and decided to go to art school.

At age 28, J.K. Rowling was a single parent living on welfare who was clinically depressed and at times has contemplated suicide.

At age 28, Wayne Coyne (from The Flaming Lips) was a fry cook.

At age 30, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.

At age 30, Martha Stewart was a stockbroker.

At age 37, Ang Lee was a stay-at-home-dad working odd jobs.

Julia Child released her first cookbook at age 39, and got her own cooking show at age 51.

Vera Wang failed to make the Olympic figure skating team, didn’t get the Editor-in-Chief position at Vogue, and designed her first dress at age 40.

Stan Lee didn’t release his first big comic book until he was 40.

Alan Rickman gave up his graphic design career to pursue acting at age 42.

Samuel L. Jackson didn’t get his first major movie role until he was 40.

Morgan Freeman landed his first MAJOR movie role at age 52.

Kathryn Bigelow only reached international success when she made The Hurt Locker at age 57.

Louise Bourgeois didn’t become a famous artist until she was 78.

Grandma Moses didn’t begin her painting career until age 76.

Whatever your dream is, it is not too late to achieve it. You aren’t a failure because you haven’t found fame and fortune by the age of 21.

Hell, it’s okay if you don’t even know what your dream is yet. Even if you’re flipping burgers, waiting tables or answering phones today, you never know where you’ll end up tomorrow.

Never tell yourself you’re too old to make it.

Never tell yourself you missed your chance.

Never tell yourself that you aren’t good enough.

You can do it. Whatever it is that sets your soul on fire.”

Tadpoles and Fireflies

Chasing tadpoles was a great way to spend time on weekends when I was a little girl. Armed with rinsed-out peanut butter bottles with holes in the lid, we’d head for the ponds near the railroad track to collect them.

I don’t think we gave much thought to what we would do with the tadpoles once we caught them. They were fun to watch swimming around in the jars. It was fun to contemplate that those little squirmy black things would one day become frogs. Of course, none of our tadpoles ever did.

There is wonder to be found in the fragility of nature. On other expeditions, we would sit quietly at night watching and then capturing fireflies in our trusty peanut butter jars.

I know now there was something in those activities about chasing and holding on to wonder. As much as I know now about phosphorescence, it never fails to amaze me. As the captive fireflies blinked on and off in their glass prisons, I was sure as a kid they were speaking directly to me if I could but interpret their messages.

The mind of a child isn’t particularly logical. That is both its blessing and its curse. In a freeform brain still unmodified by life’s harsher realizations and realities, a child can imagine damn near anything. And does. The best children’s authors know that and taper their stories to that malleable world of dreams and imaginings. I envy children’s authors for that ability. And they seem to have a lot of fun in the mix.

My friend Canadian Sheree Fitch has published dozens of children’s books It is hard to say what is more delightful and pleasing to the senses: the words or the pictures.

Parenting allows us to revisit the world of childhood which most of us lost touch with somewhere around our transition into puberty. In the course of reading bedtime stories to my children, favorite storylines and characters inevitably emerged. Watching children’s movies with kids transports us back to what was important about that time in our own lives.

Children seek structure and consistency and certainty. The best stories provide that or focus on seeking it out. There is a lot of gratuitous violence in children’s stories. Some academics say that is because childhood is full of nightmares for children. Children are largely powerless and have little to no control over what goes on around them.

I have read that is why the Harry Potter series has been so wildly popular. J.K. Rowling imbued young Harry with qualities and characteristics children long for. He was odd and longed to fit in. He had powers that could only be accessed through rigorous training. He made strong friendships with other weird and different kids like him. From a difficult beginning, Harry Potter took control of his own power and destiny.

That’s an easy sell to kids trying to sort themselves out as they grow up and experimenting with where their powers will lead them in adulthood.

In one of my unversity yearbooks, each faculty’s title page portrayed silhouetted adult graduates as children. On the Law page, a young boy no older than nine wore the black robe and white tabs of a future attorney holding a weighty tome in his little hands. The Engineering faculty was portrayed by a little girl of about seven years old who wore a hard hat and dungarees and held a slide rule and blueprints.

If I have grandchildren one day, I hope to help them explore the world around them beyond the world of bits, bytes, and WhatsApp. I want them to feel confident to test their own part in the world around them. We’ll bake cookies so they will know the magic of making their own creations. We’ll spend more time playing cards and puzzles and board games instead of in front of the television. We’ll wander in nature to encourage their appreciation of the world around them. we might even camp out and make S’mores over a campfire. That will be the greatest act of love. I detest S’mores.

And who knows? We may even find some tadpoles to collect and take home. We may talk about their dreams to become biologists or veterinarians one day. Childhood should be a time of dreams and wonder. In these fragmented times, dreams and wonder that can one day be put into action is needed now even more than ever before.