On Dreams and Impermanence

It's been a week of many thoughts on this end. Where does one begin...?

I often find it amusing, at its very least, that a change avoiding, routine loving person such as myself has chosen a career of ephemeral experience and total impermanence. The experience of the dancer, and thus of the dance therapist, is one of intentionally fleeting moments. You do something but then it becomes something else. You have an experience, and it is beautiful, yet totally intangible. Nothing is ever the same twice. That which you do is never clear cut, cannot be described in words, and is most often a mere yet gloriously telling felt experience. Impermanence is the name of the game for the dance therapist.

And yet in my life, outside of the box of dance therapy, I cling to the tangible, the known, the predictable, and the controlled. The to-do list of each day grounds me in a sense of where I am in time and space, of what accomplishment marks each passing twenty-four hours. Routine makes me feel settled, content and safe. I love the sense of knowing just what to expect and when. I love the holding on parts. Isn't that just sweet irony?

I have to believe there is some unexplainable ying and yang in all of this. Somewhere, outside of my conscious that clings to the known, is an unconscious that rides on change, resting (yes, totally and completely comfortable) in the fact that really nothing can ever just stay the same. And if it did, I might be comfortable, but I'd be stagnant. And really I don't suppose there could be anything worse. So this shadow part creeps out from my unconscious, teaching me through the fleeting, ephemeral, goingness nature of movement that there really is a part of me that loves this other side of the story. The story of change I cannot predict.

But this week, tonight, sitting here in my dimly lit office with warm tea in hand, change is simply hard. Change means grief. And I just wish that it would not have to be this way.

I am not speaking of the grief felt from losing those things we loved and know (knew?) well, whose grooves and wrinkles and laughter and edges were ingrained in our human knowingness. I am speaking, rather, of the grief for the things we have never known but only longed for...for those far off, pain-invoking, unfulfilled dreams. (Yes, I'd be drinking wine right now instead of tea if I could...)

I believe, in my better moments, that the grief of longed for, hoped for, never fulfilled dreams is something that is part of the human experience. Not something we need to drown ourselves in bottles of wine and sniffly tears over, but truly part of what it means to live on this earth. We have ideas, we create plans, and yet the story plays out differently than we ever hoped, imagined or even feared. This is us trusting in something bigger - in my world, in God - and realizing that in our infinite human smallness, unfulfilled dreams are part of the woodwork. Where old dreams die, new dreams will awaken. It's part of the journey.

But some of the dreams that die, well, some dreams are not so easily remedied or replaced by others. Two come to my mind this week especially. First, on this journey towards parenthood Paul and I find ourselves on, I have been opened and exposed in ways unknown to the pain of those around me - many dear friends - whose own journey has not been as easy. Friends whose struggle with infertility has led them to the depths of places they could not imagine, whose pain I will never pretend to understand, who have been changed by the experience of grieving for something they have never had. Their well-planned stories are changing, and I hope and pray that new dreams will spring from the depths, but in the loss of that which you have always wanted and do not have, well, it doesn't always appear to be that rosy. These friends have taught me so much already - a sense of gratefulness for our story, for the little life kicking inside of me, as well as about strength existing in a way I didn't ever know it could exist. You know who you are - thank you for teaching me through your tears.

And then the death of another dream, in the midst of thoughts about the above. Over the email machine it came this week, a not totally unexpected yet somehow shocking email. The house in Florida...the house my father built, the shell symbolizing the hopes and dreams he held for retirement and never ever got to enjoy for a second, the house that has been a point of contention in my family since the moment of its inception...it has been sold. Many years, conversations (some calm and others not so much) and endless tears led up to this seemingly anticlimactic moment. And so I weep. I weep not for the actual frame of the house, for my connection to the space was not as strong as those who hammered and nailed it themselves, but I weep for the finality that comes in the house's absence. The dream of what could be that it represented - retired winter snowbirds, family gatherings over the holidays, grandchildren taking day trips to Daytona Beach and Disney World, tinkering with cars in the garage, lazy bike rides along the windy paths - it is now really gone. In all honesty, of course, the dream has been gone for several years now. But the sale makes it so very undeniably final. And so I grieve for something that never was, that had such joy and promise, but that no matter how much I hold on desperately, just never will be.

Dreams are beautiful and amazing, and sustain us in ways that nothing else can in dark, desperate or even our mundane, everyday moments. But they carry with them unimaginable potential, and thus when they die, the loss is crushing. Humbling. Tangible. And perhaps, the darkness that looms just above the dreams we hold close to our hearts, perhaps it's that darkness that keeps me running from change. Running towards control, the known, the seemingly predictable. Trying to convince myself that they will protect me, somehow, from the pain of unexpected grief. And so I find myself on that hamster treadmill yet again where I always seem to begin - asking. When will faith be enough to sustain me? When will I stop counting on my own plans and control and neatly plotted out dreams? Will I ever be able to rest in the fact that life is impermanence, and that God intended it to be that way? I pray that someday I will. In the meantime, I return to the treadmill, knowing in the moment that although I keep coming back, at least I always return just enough different from the day before.