Journeys

Each day is really a chance for a fresh start. Somehow New Years Day is more powerful than other days for a fresh start. I have been absent from my blog over the holidays. In some ways I was absent from myself and that made it very hard to write. There is a great country song with a lyric about stepping outside the door and living someone else’s life. In the song the narrator finds everything going right and so he feels like it must be someone else’s life he is living. Over the last few weeks I have felt like I was living someone else’s life not because everything was going right but because I couldn’t recognize any part of my life as my own. Not too long ago I wrote about grief. What I was trying to communicate was the grief of losing a dream, not a person or thing. I believe we all have expectations for ourselves and our lives. Those expectations are directly related to our dreams and visions of our futures. Throughout my life I have had hardship. I have faced many challenges. Whether I was broke, or fat, or lonely, or even drunk the bad times made sense in relationship to my actions and my choices. Bad choices led to unwanted consequences and lots of wreckage to clean up. It made sense. So I grieved the dreams that feel as a result of my own choices. Today I find myself in a place that makes no sense. In the decades leading up to becoming a mom I led a selfish life. When I became pregnant with my first child I made a commitment to change everything about the way I was living. In making that commitment a dream was formed, not necessarily in my conscious mind. I went to college, I graduated at the top of my class, I was offered a dream job before graduation and my life began. It was still a life of challenges. I was still broke, still unhappy with my physical appearance, still driving a junk car etc… but it was my life. I saw a future of my own making. I was confident and dare I say happy? Somehow in the six years from the time I graduated until now …I had to resign from my job, lost my house and moved my family 1500 miles. I can’t find a job in my chosen profession, the situation makes graduate school an option that has to wait, broke is something I would like to be because today I am poor, and yes there is a difference between broke and poor. Grieving the dream has been hard because I never really recognized that I was living the dream. I was so busy all the time trying not to lose anything that I never realized I had everything. Today I still have everything that matters. I have lost nothing that is really important. There is one thing missing, I don’t have a dream. It seems I have lost the ability to dream. I had to work so hard to accept where I am, to say even without a job, or health insurance or a home I am ok, that I am afraid to dream again. So it seems that today I have found myself in a nether world. So I have told myself, self… you need a fresh start. I can think of no better day than the first day of 2009 to grant myself permission to dream again. So today I am dreaming of being a non-smoker, again. I am going to dream that dream until it comes true. When it does then I will work on dreaming another dream. One day at a time, one dream at a time maybe I will find my life again. Happy New Year and may you dream a dream today!

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