Changing the Dream

I spend a lot of time sitting in an armchair that was my father’s favorite chair, placed in our family room next to the window.  As I was growing up in a small town outside of Chicago, I recall how my father loved this over-stuffed chair with its matching ottoman and relaxed in it every night after a long day at work. When he passed away, my mother settled into “Papa’s chair” for many years, observing our front yard and the comings and goings of our neighborhood.  Over time, this venerable throne has aged. The fabric that is a green Southwestern print has faded from the sun. The stuffing in the cushions has settled into slightly lumpy but contoured shape for a perfect fit.   Now, it’s my turn to occupy this comfy seat as I heal myself.

  I’m going to be spending three hours a day sitting around in a splint for the next couple of months, which is supposed to speed up the stretching and bending of my right arm and elbow.  It’s also going to give me probably way too much time to think. In fact, I have been trying to spend more time not thinking, just meditating and staring out the window at the beautiful peaceful view while our cat. Velcro, sprawls sleeping on my lap. If I position myself properly, I can see the horses in the back pasture by gazing out of the windows across the room as well as observing the goings-on in the front of our property.

 It’s a perfect place to use my laptop to visit everyone’s blogs. I was traveling around the Internet the other day and stopped to check in with my friend, Deborah Carr, at  “Nature ofWords”. She lives in Eastern Canada in a panoramic bit of heaven.  Her post about how things don't always go as planned when following one’s dreams gave me lots of food for thought: “I’m not saying that dreams are not worth fighting for, certainly the purpose of a dream is to pull us beyond our boundaries, but maybe it’s worth examining why This Dream is so damn important. I think sometimes you have to pick that old heavy rock of a Dream up, turn it over and look beneath to see what is really there. Is it money, recognition, status, power, ambition, security, envy? …..Or is it someone else’s Dream?”

I’ve always been a big one for dreaming a dream and following it. I’ve also gone down several paths and hit a dead end or decided that it wasn’t really going to be what I had dreamed it would be. I have learned that one dream usually leads to another and another. I don’t regret pursuing any of these dreams that I left by the wayside because each one gave me a skill or a lesson that I needed at that time. Still, I think that Deborah brings up an important idea. Certainly, at this point in my life,  I’m free floating and reconsidering what direction I want to go next. I get lots of helpful suggestions –“You should do this. You should do that.” And then, there’s all this crazy new technology racing along at the speed of light, outmoding and replacing many of the creative avenues that I used to travel. 

It’s probably a good thing that I have a well-worn, time tested seat in which to contemplate what it all means to me.  As Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote: “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”