Dreaming is Crap

It's easy to say it out loud: to look into someone's eyes and own what I daydream about every single day of my life. It's easy to think what if and when and someday I will when my dreams hover like white puffs swarming in mid-December air, visible as long as I keep talking, fleeting the moment my lips close.

It's easy to say because in the deepest bowels of my existence, it turns out that I do want every last thing I dream about. I do want to pour myself on paper and toss it out to the world and reach some distant soul who needed to read what I had to say at some particular moment in time. I do want to make something that lasts, that captures our lives, today, and add it to the enormous time capsule of contemporary history. I do want to drill into my brain, set up a rig, and shuttle my imaginative musings out of hibernation and into my fingers so I can come alive. I do want to open a package, find a book with my name on it, hold it up to my nose, shut my eyes, and breathe it in. 

Like me, there are millions of people busy wanting and wishing and wondering. We are all trapped in a cobweb of hope, our fingers and toes stuck, tangled in strings of fear, doubt, duty, and insecurity. All of us dangle there, hanging, our past behind us, our dreams playing out across the room. We can see them vividly. We can even see the people who have already achieved them: those who overcame adversity, those who hit it big on YouTube or Twitter or Instagram, those who just so happened to catch the right person's attention through a forward of a forward of a forward. 

Those who simply took a risk and managed to break free.

They're all there.  

And I envy them.  

I waste a gajillion minutes every single day envying them, wishing I could pull myself loose string by string, and join the conversation, wishing my dream didn't seem so faint and real life didn't seem so comfortable.

But then, a few days ago, in the midst of my comfort, I came across a video of Shonda Rhimes delivering her 2014 commencement address to Dartmouth College. Several of my classmates from Dartmouth posted the video on Facebook, and curious, I took a moment to watch.

"When people give these kinds of speeches, they usually tell you all kinds of wise and heartfelt things" Rhimes said a few minutes in, after explaining to the audience that she doesn't like giving speeches and she is afraid she is going to "pass out" or "die" or "poop her pants."  

"They tell you: Follow your dreams. Listen to you spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big. As a matter of fact, dream and don't stop dreaming until all of your dreams come true."

She paused.  Then, she said, "I think that's crap."

As she spoke, the videographer panned the graduate section, showcasing an array of black gowns adorned in yellow and orange and red and white hoods. Just behind them, we could see a few rows of undergraduates, some in the traditional black garb, others sitting on top of their split-open gown, shoulders bared, presumably hoping to snag a few rays as they float in time, lost in limbo between everything they knew and everything they dreamed.

I remember being one of them.  I remember wanting to stop and greet honorary graduates Hank Aaron and J.K. Rowling as I made my way to President Wright's outstretched hand. I remember the weight of my degree. I remember leaving the stage, full of pride, full of sadness, full of grief. I remember wallowing in the strange reality that everything I worked for my entire life was ending, and I was now free to fly.

I remember feeling lost. I remember being scared. I remember wondering where my path would go.

That girl needed to hear what Rhimes was saying.  

Heck, this girl still needs to hear what she is saying.

I leaned closer to the screen.

"I think a lot of people dream," Rhimes began again. "And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, engaged, powerful people, are busy doing....

Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral, pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It's hard work that makes things happen. It's hard work that creates change."

I paused the video. I felt the words on my tongue: dreaming without doing is crap. 

Crap.

I know that. As the girl who threw a hundred pitches rain or shine every single day of her life until the last day of her softball career, I knew it. As the girl who wrote ten page papers instead of five page papers, I knew it. As the girl who stayed up late to grade her essays in one week's time rather than two or three weeks time, I knew it. 

I absolutely knew it.

I've always known it.  

Anyone who has ever pursued anything worthwhile knows it.

I sat in my seat fully convicted. As much as I live it in every other area of my life, I don't live it with my dreams anymore, and I'm not sure how I ended up here as a non-doer or a partial doer or a when-I-have-time doer: as a dreamer. 

That wasn't who I was when I sat on those white chairs littering the Dartmouth Green.  It wasn't who I was when my starry eyes led me to New York City or my heavy heart propelled me to graduate school or my free spirit flew me to Florence, Italy.

It wasn't who I was and it is not who I want to be.

I no longer want to continue living in my brain and floating in the sky.

I want to push my words to the edge of the airplane and let them dive face first into a vat of ink, tumble onto parchment, and nestle into a piece of paper anchored to the earth. 

I want to put myself out there. I no longer want to sit back, overwhelmed, unsure where to start.

I want to write. 

And so I must write.

If I want my dreams to become real, I need to chase after them. I need to own them, dissect them, explore them, understand them and pursue them.  

I need to stop theorizing and fantasizing, and instead, discover the gold nugget postulate that explains how someone like me can defy gravity. I need to sharpen my voice, find my path, understand my market, surrender my inhibitions and write.

I need to make a schedule, sign my name to it and work hard. String, by string, I need to pull myself down, steady my feet and find my way. It's about time I get off of my butt and stop making excuses for letting my writing dream trail further and further away as I focused on my students, or on moving or on my wedding or on becoming a mom or on any of the other thousands of things that simply make up real life.

Shonda Rhimes is right: dreaming without doing is crap. 

And so, after a year long break, I'm back in the blogging sphere. I'm jumping in headfirst. I'm ready to learn. I'm ready to work. I'm ready to get reacquainted with the person I want to be.

I'm ready to do.

Gratitude

"You need a gratitude journal," I said, and then I pulled a cup of warm coffee to my lips, paused long enough to inhale its thick, deep fumes, and tilted the edge of the cup toward my mouth.

My friend simpered as she sipped her latte, gazing up at me with two scrunched eyes that very clearly uttered huh?

"It's this journal that you keep by your bed. Before you fall asleep, you write in it. No matter how bad your day seems, you have to be thankful for something. That's what you write down," I said, squaring her eyes directly for moments at a time, occasionally lightening the delivery with sips of coffee, and glances toward an imaginary spot nestled deep inside the tiles of the floor.

Her lips squeezed a bit at the thought, fighting to press back a smile, waiting me out in an effort to determine whether or not I was actually serious.

I proceeded as if I didn't notice.

"You might repeat a lot of them over and over, but when you look back, you'll find an incredible list of positives. I was pretty bummed out when I did it the last time. I almost quit my job, moved across the country and abandoned everyone in my life. I started writing in that journal and well... it might sound stupid, but it helped."

She watched me a few minutes longer, then she shrugged. "I'll try it," she promised, swirling her cup as she spoke.

We rounded out our coffee date with details, updates about the previous few weeks, predictions about the ones still to come. When our sipping cups were dry, we left. And I forgot all about the gratitude journal. I forgot about our chat, about my idea, about my insistence that positive energy had the ability to squash sadness.

I forgot about it until tonight.

Tonight, as I drove home from a family dinner, I reflected. My voice, tinged with bitterness, felt foreign and cruel. And the grouch who showed up dressed in my clothes sent waves of remorse through my conscience. I shouldn't have let it get to me--I should not have let the weight of things I can't control press down on my shoulders so hard I lose sight of who I am. I should not have, but I did.

And as I meandered through neighborhood streets, making my way home, I remembered the gratitude journal. I remembered its lined pages, and the words too heavy for them to hold. I remembered how it felt to sit and grip its smooth cover, straining to extract each day's simplicities, thankful to record them all. And each night, as I wrote the date at the top, I remembered gazing back at what came before, and wondering what might come next. And for those few moments, propped up on the shoulders of optimism, I felt buoyant, bobbing on a sanguine sea wide-open and ready to be conquered.

Tonight, when I got home, I walked to my room and found the journal, stuffed beneath memorabilia in the bottom of a box. As I flipped through the pages, I remembered that girl. I remembered those nights. And I remembered how desperately I would have wanted to trade places with the girl I am now.

And so I started to write.

I'm grateful for my husband, for finding the "reliable, spontaneous, fun, funny, thoughtful, caring, integrity-filled, compassionate, dreamer, ambitious, honest, selfless" sort of love I said I wanted to be thankful for when I wrote in my journal on March 8, 2008 at 12:55 a.m.

I am grateful for my family. For their love, their support and their concern. For the fact they don't turn their backs on me when I'm grouchy and grumpy and sad.

I am grateful for my coworkers. Each day--despite the difficulties that plague us--I am reminded of their brilliance, their compassion and their dire determination to make a difference in the lives of kids.

I am grateful for my friends, scattered across the city, across the country and some, across the world. I am rich with the joy they have given me, and I am better because they have helped to shape my life.

I am grateful for those who came before me. Those who stood up, spoke up and squared up. Those who fought to make things better. Those who gave me a voice.

I am grateful for....

Mid-keystroke, I turned to the old journal beside me. I longed for another dance upon her pages. I longed to feel her strength in my fingers, and to fill her lines with my hopes. I longed to remember how lucky I am and I longed to trust in the luck that is yet to come.

And because of how deeply I longed, she will get the rest of my words tonight.

Drink and be Filled up

I've lived under a rather dense pile of heavy, air-tight dirt for the last seven days. It's the kind of dirt that clumps inside your mouth, presses on your shoulders, and inspires you to dive head first into second base, beating--of course--with the potential of rounding third and heading home.

Adolescent performers shuddered a bit as they trudged to the front of the room, breath all out of whack until they pulled it in, focused their energy and delivered magic from the tips of their toes and the ridges of their tongue. As a judge, I sat and listened to them. I watched their nervous antics, I witnessed transformations, I observed a few tragic collapses.

Words pelted my skin like rapid fire and inspiration bled like an open wound. I wanted so badly to soak it up, but in the end, time didn't allow for any sort of manifestation. Instead, I replayed poems in my mind, and I looked a few up on the computer. Then I gazed up at a clock that informed me it was time to get to work.

I wiped stainless faucets with rubbing alcohol, I scrubbed an already clean toilet and then I dusted books on my bookshelf. My fingers tingled a bit as I pressed them back and then forward, wiping away particles that clung to the bindings with determination. As my fingers pulled those particles away, they gloated a bit over their victory, over the moments they knew they'd one day get to press their pads on the pages and open worlds of magic.

Those books made me want to write. Those books made me want to create something that moved people as much as so many of those precious papers moved me. I wanted to pour, to explode, to wander, to dive back inside my ideas and press them into reality.

The clock told me it was time to do school work. And I walked to my bag and pulled out the materials.

Marlene, one of my team members, reserved Fresh Air recordings from the library and Stephen King was one of the interviewees. I plugged him into my laptop and listened. He read from On Writing in the interview. I wanted to read the story for myself and so I walked back to the shelves. Stephen King peered up at me from his rightful spot, nestled tightly between Maxine Hong Kingston and John Knowles.

I've had that book on my self for a few years, but I have only read the back. I meant to dive inside it--in fact, I have wanted to devour it since I knew it existed--but I let life get in the way. I let the dust grip it as tightly as I would have gripped it had I opened my fingers and freed the words.

I lost myself in the couch cushions as Stephen King wrenched open his skull, and sliced open his heart, telling me why he writes, how he writes, and why I need to get reacquainted with my computer. Suddenly, time didn't matter so much.

"Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book--perhaps too much--has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it--and perhaps the best of it--is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up" (King 269-270).

I will.

Sit

PROMPT: Grab the closest book. Think of your favorite number. Turn to that page and write the first full sentence you see. Write the story that comes next.

The Help; Page 9

“She got this way a clearing her throat real delicate-like that get everybody’s attention without they even knowing she made em do it.”

Alice turned her head. When no one could see her face, the edges of her lips bent up slightly. Thomas had her pinned. He was the only one who seemed to catch on to her antics. The rest of the table moved on, squinting their eyes and carrying on about their business.

Even though she got caught, it was nice to be understood. It was nice to have someone know you inside and out, even the bad stuff.

Thomas changed the game. He barreled into her life, propping everything she ever wanted on his back. The weight encumbered him some—enough to stop and catch his breath sometimes—but never too much to greet her with a smile.

****

This little morning diversion offered me a strange woman and a strange man whose sole purpose was to get me thinking about love. Love in the sense of real. Love in the sense of understanding. Love in the sense of accountability. Love in the sense of one who can see into us.

I woke up late to write this morning—on day one. Scrambling around the kitchen, making coffee and throwing together lunches, I bounded frantically around my exceptionally small kitchen--not small, of course, for New York standards, but microscopic for Midwest ones. My husband emerged from the shower, noticed my flurrying, and inquired about the cause.

“I’m not going to be able to write on day one. Day one,” I mumbled irritated, boasting the very tone I hoped my writing would minimize.

“Just start right now. Don’t cheat by writing for longer than you said you would. Sit down and just write.”

He pointed in the most loving way possible; I sat. Then I opened my laptop, I picked a prompt and I attempted to summon the Muses. My faucet of inspiration seemed to be as empty as my coffee cup. And so I stopped. I refilled and I decided that part of journaling is being okay with whatever comes--or doesn't come.

Today when my husband reached for my shoulders and told me to just write, I realized that he could see into me in a way no else quite can; he was my Thomas. As strange as my blogging commitment might seem to him, he knows it means a lot to me, and so because he loves me, he keeps me accountable. He helps me to accept being real. And at the end of the day, even when my hair is messy and I’m scattered and disappointed in myself, he understands. Even if I didn’t get off to a perfect start, I will start my day remembering that I’m loved. I’m not sure I could devise a better beginning.