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.

I Want...

I want someone to put the world back together.  The sky seems to be crumbling, and as I sift through the dust, I want to squeeze my eyes and imagine I’m just Chicken Little.   I want a man painted with red and blue spandex to scale my house.  I want Wonder Woman to arrive and demand that everyone instantly starts embracing love, peace and sexual equality.  And then, once the super heroes arrive, I want Athena to suddenly appear and conveniently usher in wisdom.

I want the paranoia to dissolve. I want teaching to crawl from its anvil of checklists and prescription, and once again reassume its spot as an art.   I want us to see kids as human beings and not data, and teachers as shapers not disseminators and interveners.  I want kids to play outside again, and I want imaginations to soar.  I want us to remember what its like to dream.  I want us to be good.  I want us to think.  I want us to read.  I want us to color outside the lines. 

And I want us to trust.

I want people to listen to Walt Whitman and be curious not judgmental.  I want our voices to matter.  I want bitterness and revenge to melt away.  I want us to work together.  I want us to accept, to challenge, to refocus on what matters.  I want us to strip away the hypocrisy, the jealousy, and the greed.  I want us to reach out our hands, help each other up, pat one another on the back, and say, “you can do it; you matter,” because everyone matters.

I want to wake up feeling lighter.  I want to rise like the flag.  I want to reach for the moon.  I want unity.  I want love.  I want people to stop killing—with words and guns and bombs.  I want decency and civility. I want people to be generous and authentic and kind.

And until all of that arrives, I suppose I’ll have to be happy that Athena lives in my books, and my family and friends still make me smile.

Beneath the Scum

It was then that I came crumbling down—

Like the buildings,

Like the airplanes,

Like the hearts and the guts and the papers,

The papers that should have been consumed

Instead of the steel.

It was then that the air tasted like burnt wires—

Like cotton candy flavored with gasoline,

Like tornados of dust,

Like the people who jumped and burned and cried,

The people who never got to live the rest of their life

Because of some else’s hatred.

It was then that I saw my reflection in the glass—

Like a good friend telling me that my dress is too tight,

Like my soul whispering its deepest desire,

Like a foggy image in dirty water,

Hidden by a plate of pond scum

Beautiful beneath the weeds.

It was then that I smelled my calling—

Like my husband’s after shave streaked on his collar,

Like truth stinking up the statehouse,

Like vanilla pomegranate slicing through ash,

Killing the odor of fear and horror and sadness

And the scent of my neighbors who never came home.

It was then that I knew I would become someone else—

Someone who strove to stain the world with compassion.

I would no longer climb ivy-lined ladders.

I would cease to exploit emotions for a living.

I would honor, I would give, I would live.

And every time I woke up, I’d look up—past the scum—and forgive.

Sitting on my Hands

I spent my entire first grade year plopped on top of my hands.

I'm not sure if that's because the teacher wanted to halt my clear propensity for excessive gesticulation, or if she believed squashing my fingers might get me to stop talking.

Either way, I suppose it worked.

"Please stop talking, Laura," she always said with a stern nod.  Then she'd look me square in the eyes and point to the plastic seat that cradled my bottom.  "Now, on your hands."

I complied.  Not because I wanted to, of course.  I complied because she scared me.

And all I remember learning in first grade is that sitting on your hands for long periods of time is pretty uncomfortable.  But I suppose I also learned that you can get used to anything.

As miserable as it was, it stopped my talking.

It also muffled my voice.

And since I no longer possessed the grand ticket to send my hands and my voice traveling across thousands of stale air particles hovering in my first grade classroom, my mind had to invent some place for my over-active self to go.

While I appeared to be following directions, sitting quietly in my seat, I'd often disappear--out the window, through the chalkboard, down the trap door I knew had to exist somewhere on the floor beneath me.  I donned all sorts of costumes and possessed all sorts of powers, and I'm entirely convinced that those imaginative journeys--commencing with my hands pressed beneath my legs--saved me from getting kicked out of my Catholic grade school.

They also saved the voice my first grade teacher was trying desperately to silence.

The following school year, against that teacher's wishes, my parents enrolled me in Mrs. Adams's second grade class.  Her environment instantly changed me.  We sat in desks facing each other; I no longer had to stare at Elizabeth or Andrew's head.

And during silent time--when I finished all of my tasks--instead of telling me to stop talking, stare forward and sit still, Mrs. Adams rested a sheet of paper in front of me.

"Laura, why don't you write me a story?"
"Laura, why don't you make me a poem?"
"Laura, can I share this with my boys as their bed time story?"

She gave me purpose.  She gave me a challenge.  She gave me freedom.

I spilled everything I had onto that cheap, shiny sliver of white paper.  I flipped it, colored it, and surrendered my imagination on it.  With her consistent, reliable words, Mrs. Adams filled my days with joy and my fingers with colorful words.

Sure, I still squirmed--but it was a focused squirm.  I still rocked my foot, bit my lip, and twisted in my seat--but I didn't stop working.  I still chewed my pencil, picked at my fingernails, and bounced my leg--but I heard every word she said and I voiced every important thing I wondered.

And so today, when Betty, Mike and I talked about ADHD accommodations, and Betty and I laughed about my ADHD moments while teaching, I fondly remembered back to first and second grade--why I lost focus to begin with, and how a little bit of challenge and a whole lot of belief helped me to get it back.

Tangled

I rediscovered this poem today as I scanned my files from this summer.  I wrote it as an exercise in a poetry class and after thinking about why I loved Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, I couldn't help but linger on this language and the moment that produced it.  I know it isn't typical blogging me, but it's the me I am tonight:

Tumble

D

O

W

N

TaNgLed StReEtS

And cease your efforts to untangle them.

Allow the grass to graze upon asphalt,

Peruse the pigeon’s overcoat,

Marvel at the pulse of purple-bellied mosquitoes,

Implore your mind to digest new perspectives.

Press the prints of your thumb and pinky together—

And like an escaping convict—

Slip your wrist through the cuff of social expectation.

Gallop barefoot,

Entreat your gaze,

Embrace your diversions,

Invite your mind to wander,

To ponder recklessly like iron intended for demolition,

Intended for dispatching stores of luscious mental debris.

Strike the rules,

Rip off the gag,

Tip the carafe to

                                         let

the energy

                                                                          s  p  i  l  l .

Poison ordinary streams with original ideas.

Erode your damns,

Deconstruct your walls,
Empty your sandbags;

Bag the water instead.

Keep it to raise the dead,

To hydrate the words

Shriveled beneath the dust

Ogling at the possibilities

                                                         just beyond the silk—

Where the boats have water,

And the sky has wind

And ideas are free to

S     A     I      L . . .

Dumpster Diving

I started my day in the dumpster.

Well, I wasn't exactly in the dumpster, submerged knee deep in garbage. It was more like a bent at the waist, tottering in mid-air, employing my go-go gadget arm, as I reached for my fallen keys in the corner of a very large and stinky receptacle type of "in the dumpster."

Of course my keys ended up in the dumpster because I didn't listen to the years of advice warning me not to carry too much. Rather than make two trips, I decided to fill my arms with awkwardly balanced items. And those awkwardly balanced items did as most awkwardly balanced items do--they wobbled and bobbled until they all fell down.

I blame this partially on the fact I am carrying around two sets of keys--one for my condo, the other for my rental car, a lovely byproduct of my 15 mph fender bender with a guy who decided to gun it rather than to inch out into the intersection. I held the car keys in my left hand, with my mug of coffee and lunch bag, and I held the trash, a container of snack nuts and my condo keys in my right hand. As I wound up to toss the trash into the mouth of the beast, my condo keys caught the edge of the plastic bag and managed to plummet to the base of my arch enemy.

When I move, I will not miss that dumpster. I will not miss the thunderous gong of his Monday morning emptying, or the flies he attracts in the summer. While it has provided an onslaught of entertainment, I will also not miss the over-indulged festival goers who feel comfort in their effort to congregate around his opening just in case they need to dig for styrofoam boxes containing four day old carryout food, or even worse, those in need of a receptacle for what ever gurgles in their stomach or desires to escape their bladder.

And while I appreciate the spirit of the people who are looking for free food and refurbishable furniture, I will also not miss waiting for the dumpster divers to get out of the middle of the road so I can make my way through the alley and into my parking spot. But mostly, I will not miss the times I have accidently found myself in position to do some dumpster diving of my own, all because I didn't want to make two trips through the parking lot, and managed to toss my slippery keys directly into a mound of gritty, foul smelling trash.

But I have nearly a month to go before I am home free. I have a month to go before I have a real trash can outside my door, and a parking spot inside my garage. I have a month to go before I am entirely absolved from the possibility of beginning my day extending my fingers in a slow-motion-montage type of moment, only to watch my object of desire tumble speck by speck through the air and into the very thing I most seek to avoid.

It was bad enough to lose my keys, to dig through coffee grinds, banana peels and sour beer, but it was even worse that mid-effort, as I focused my energy on the fleeting rescue of my keys, I managed to subsequently release the grip on the mug of coffee held in the clutch of my left hand. As my keys tumbled, so did that coffee, smashing plastic against concrete with the force of utter devastation, launching slivers of hot heaven through the air and directly onto the fabric of my crisp, white pants.

And so, without time to change, I had to arrive to school with brown stains on my white pants, fingers flaked with nasty residue, and a foul dumpster stench laced across the base of my nostrils. Even worse, I had to deal with all of it sans a capsule of warm, nurturing caffeine.

I scowled at that grimy little dumpster when I came home today. He claimed me on Christmas Eve and Tax Day. I'll be ready when my birthday rolls around; I'm going to load my car the night before.

Sometimes We Just Need to Write

Thank you cards are underrated.

It's funny, my thoughts have turned to potential first lines for the last seven days. I took such a long break from my blog, it seemed almost futile to jump back into the page and wrap my ideas inside letters. My husband even asked when I planned to start writing again.

"I don't know. Maybe tomorrow," I kept telling him. I wasn't sure where to begin.

But then, I walked to mailbox and I found a letter. And for the second time in seven days, my eyes grew misty.

My life has not been short on blogging muses. Over the last few weeks, J and I met our two nieces and our nephew for the first time, I survived my first attempt at skiing in Colorado, we snowshoed in Rocky Mountain National Park, our condo is in contract, we found our new home, I got into a car accident, I spilled coffee on my laptop, I started working out with a personal trainer, and I got rescued by a ranger in a local Columbus park.

There are a lot of stories in there. Stories that have filled me with with joy, wonder, fear and hope. Moments that challenged me, or changed me. Experiences that have made me appreciate some aspect of life. And yet, with each passing day, all of them seemed to slip through the hourglass before I could punch them into existence. At a certain point, I wasn't sure where to start, and so I just let them all go.

Wishing for the push to find my voice again, I found it today, freed by a thank you note painted with dainty, red flowers, and thin, wandering branches. At eight o'clock this morning, I reached into my mailbox expecting to find flyers or notifications. Instead, I found myself thumbing the ridges of textured paper, pulling open a card containing the words of a former student who decided to thank me for the role I played in her life two years ago.

My eyes misted before I made it half-way down the page. I instantly thought of my mother.

My mother touted thank you cards throughout my childhood, and my reaction today illustrates why. As a child, the moment my last friend wandered beneath the threshold and all that remained of my party was chocolate cake and colored balloons, my mom handed me a stack of cards and instructed me to write. I'd sit, begrudgingly--knowing better than to argue--and press the tip of the pen to the page in an effort to express my gratitude.

"You'll thank me one day," my mom always told me.

I may never know the magnitude of any of my letters, but I certainly understand the magnitude of the letters I've received, the letters scribed by the hands of people who--on account of me--poured their heart into cool, wet ink. Humbled by the weight of something so simple in principle, but so enormous in effect, I am still paralyzed each time I hold a thoughtful, hand-written note in my hand.

And so it was today, when I walked to my mailbox to find A's letter. In this fast-paced world, we rarely thank each other. We text, we facebook, we email and sometimes we call, but very rarely do we plop down behind a desk, prop a pen into the crook of our fingers, and write a note to someone else. Very rarely are our mailboxes stuffed with anything other than political propaganda, sales brochures and bills.

But when they are, it is magical.

And lucky me got two doses of magic in the last seven days. Last Thursday, S told me he just found out that he got (nearly) a full ride scholarship and he thanked me for helping him with his essays. Today, A thanked me for being in her life. Two different students, writing for two different reasons. Both notes: fully unexpected and far too kind. Both notes: reminded me that I matter. That each day we all have the chance to matter. To reach out, to speak, to say hello, to say thank you, to say let me help you out, to ask how we make someone else's life just a little bit better.

Sometimes what we do doesn't have to be very big. Sometimes, we just need to write.