What Kills Our Dreams

I’m reading through the fine print of another travel insurance policy, my laptop perched atop a coffee table book about dinosaurs and an atlas of the human body so I can write standing up. My neck is sore because I spent the last few hours working on my belly with my chin propped up on my hands. But my toes are still tingling and there’s a familiar ache spreading across the right side of my lower back and wrapping around my hip. I’m thinking about the permaculture co-op in northern England that’s eager to have me volunteer with them this summer and wondering how in the world I’m going to tackle this trip if my back won’t let me work for room and board. I could be just as likely to heal pulling weeds and collecting eggs as standing at my computer all day. Then again, I could get carried away with digging and hauling and tear a disc completely. And in that case, what is my best bet for care: the generosity of a foreign national health system, my tenuous Medicaid coverage, my worker’s comp claim from home, or one of these supplemental policies, primary or secondary, with or without pre-existing conditions? I’m unwilling to abandon my dream so long as I can pick up a bag and walk, but what began as a vision of abundant freedom is now saddled by vigilance to ensure I stay fit enough to preserve what is left. My dream of slinging hay bales and trekking the Alps is as gone as my rental agreement and my kitchen table. And there is no way out but forward.

A poet friend told me years ago that we must learn to love what kills our dreams. What sounded to me initially like wisdom triggered an impulsive defensiveness. Of course we must embrace adversity, but no, we must fight to keep our dreams alive! The riddle of his words possessed me through hours of journaling and drafting poems determined to reconcile my conflicted feelings. I explored whether love means affection or simply acceptance. I questioned whether killing is necessarily an aggressive act or a merciful part of every life cycle. I asked myself about all the dreams I have held – about how many of them were real expressions of my essence and how many needed to be laid to rest. And I wondered, above all else, what it is that counters them – whether spitefully or with tenderness. Is the greatest threat something out in the world that demands I fight or requires my surrender? Is it something inside of me that needs to be rooted out or some essential part that I would be wise not to shame or resent?

As I often do when faced with any formidable doubt, I began looking for patterns in the fate of my past dreams. Some of them, like being a marine biologist, I released because the reality of the work did not fit me as I had imagined. Others, like graduate school, I abandoned because I wasn’t motivated enough to push through the barriers. Some were enduring dreams, like those of love and belonging, that are fleetingly fulfilled and then slip away into deeper, subtler aches. And some of my dreams have unquestionably come true, like having certain experiences in meditation and getting hired on after my VISTA year, but after enjoying the satisfaction for a time, I set them aside for new challenges. Whether or not a particular dream came true, and whether I abandoned the dream or it slipped away from me, nothing I have envisioned or achieved endures. The fate of my dreams appears tied both to external circumstances beyond my control and to my own inner storm of thoughts and feelings fed by fear, stubbornness, restlessness, short-sightedness, and a hesitance to accept full responsibility for my life.

All of these threats are gathering around my growing uncertainty over my dream of traveling the world. Even as things move forward – confirming a few farm stays, giving notice on my apartment, selling off my furniture, sorting my accounts, getting a car sitter – there are so many things that remain legitimate threats – my visas, my health insurance, my phone plan, my difficulty finding a spring placement, and this back pain. With every set-back, I confront a choice of whether to surrender some part of my dream or to fight for it; to make the trip to San Francisco to apply for a visa in person or simply shorten my stay in France; to take my laptop so I can easily blog or to release my reliance on technology to keep me connected; to join the Rajneesh center or abandon my vision of Tuscany in spring. With every small logistical choice I am required to make to keep my dream alive among external realities, I risk killing the very heart of what I have always believed it is meant to be – an open exploration of the unknown.

Perhaps that is part of the lesson I recognized in that riddle about the death of dreams. The only dreams that aren’t constantly morphing and passing away are those I hold for the future, those I can still believe promise a permanent sense of satisfaction or comfort simply because they have not been tested by reality. I defend them as if my very survival is tied to theirs, but they have never really even been born. They are like paper boats I have folded so beautifully and impress the world with tales of how effortlessly they will drift buoyant and upright through all manner of wind and wave. But these dreams are useless for anything but building hope, and hope is useless unless it is set free to act upon the world. My dream of being a master ship-builder is meaningless until I set that boat on the water. Then it becomes a living thing. It will glide for as long as it can. It will raise our spirits and then break our hearts, for even if it floats longer and travels farther than any boat before it, it will eventually sink. I will watch helpless from the shore as my dream takes on water and crumbles and disappears into the deep. And then I get to choose whether to lament ever having set it free or to rejoice in how beautifully it did what it was destined to do.

Whether we learn to love what kills our dreams or not, they will undoubtedly be tested. They will shift and wither and re-sprout. That is no failure or weakness of ours, or even any fundamental cruelty or flaw in our world. It is simply how it is with living things, and how it is to be in love with anything – the tenderness, the worry, the denial, and the heart-break. Sometimes we reconcile and recommit, sometimes we release and move on. But I am coming to understand that I must love my dreams, every single one of them, so that I can have the courage to breathe them into being, so that I do not stay stuck in pining for those that have passed, and so that my heart can remain soft and open to the next dream that is coming to find me. I am no more able to escape my worries over all that can go wrong on my trip any more than I am able to wish away my injured disc. They are spurs for me to endure whether I love them or not, but learning to at least accept their presence is the best way to ensure I am free from bitterness – either over fate or over my own short-comings.

My counselor believes that anyone with the courage to take the journey of faith, should. Courage has been revealing itself to me not as a stubborn determination to push forward against all odds or to plow through whatever internal or external barriers I encounter, but to embrace the shifting nature of a dream actively lived in that gentle space between hope and limitation. We must learn to love what kills our dreams because the biggest threat to them is not what we encounter in the world around us, but in whether or not we are able to grieve for the dreams that were not meant to be ours, that were born before there was enough nourishment to sustain them, or that lived beautifully and were ready to transform into something new. Loving the things in our world and in ourselves that threaten the dreams we cling to is the only way to access the compassion, ingenuity, and resilience that enables us to welcome and celebrate the dream that is being born, even in those darkest moments of doubt.

Nancy

“We women have lived too much with closure: ‘If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get that job’ – there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin. Endings are for romance or for day-dreams… but not for life.” – Carolyn Heilburn