Dreaming

"If you follow every dream, you may get lost." -- Neil Young

I ran across this quote earlier today during my morning reading. And to be honest, I've been thinking about it all day. I shared it with several people with whom I'm working, and one of them said, "I love this quote! Because if you listen to the people who are always on Oprah, they constantly say, 'If you can dream it, you can do it!' Young's line makes plain the reality of our limitations."

Amen.

Young's line also questions the assumption that life must pay off by rewarding us with fulfilled dreams at every turn -- even when those dreams are contradictory or draw us away from our own integrity. At some point, we have to accept certain limitations -- only so many hours in the day, only so much energy, only so much talent. This isn't easy for most of us. We keep hoping that we can break free of the limitations of time and space. If we just "wish upon a star" correctly, or offer the appropriate "Shazzam!" at just the right time...THEN, our dreams will come true.

The fact is, some dreams, regardless of the intensity of our efforts, will fail to come to fruition. In other cases, we continue to say we have something as a "dream", but we never actually take any sort of concrete action toward it (I would suggest these sorts of dreams are really little more than fanciful fantasies).

But every now and then, we will be captured by a dream to such an extent we will give over our entire self -- body, mind and soul -- to pursuing it. And occasionally such single-minded focus yields either the fulfillment of the dream or significant progress toward that fulfillment.

A few days ago, as this country remembered the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., the grainy footage of what has come to be known as his "I Have a Dream" speech was played and replayed. As I listened to his inspiring words yet another time, I was reminded of the price he paid for his dream:

People tried to ignore him.

He refused to be ignored.

People tried to make him go away.

He refused to be silenced.

People tried to persuade him to move more slowly.

He refused to be impeded.

People threatened his life.

He refused to surrender to the threats.

He was singularly focused on his dream. A dream that was bigger than he could possibly bring about by himself. He would not take detours. He would not be deterred. He paid dearly for his fixation on the dream, and he died without being seeing it come to pass. Some would say we're still a long ways away from the Promised Land of equality for all God's people. I would agree. Yet, we are further down the road toward that destination because of King's tenacity and focus.

Young's lyric and King's life are instructive in a culture that operates within the fantasy of entitlement underwritten by the myth of the "multi-tasker". We only have so much time and energy (and we don't know when either of those commodities will expire for us). We cannot do it all, in spite or our attempts to do so.

As for me, now is the time to admit it. I've wandered around from curiosity to curiosity. Ostensibly interested in many things, but committed to little. Unwilling to voluntarily narrow my focus.

The results? Well, I think some parts of my life have (unintentionally) proven the truthfulness of Young's lyric! I've been lost a few times. I've been confused about my "next steps" many, many more times! But for now, in this moment, I've reconnected with recognition that to decide one thing is to decide to leave another thing undone.

What next?

I'm think it's time to decide which dreams I'll release into the ether -- letting go of them, so they will let go of me. Then, I'm going to give some thought to the dreams that have captured my heart and my imagination.

After all of that?

I'm going to pray for the tenacity to follow a dream or two, and then pursue those dreams like the requisite tenacity has already arrived. Wishing upon a star may work for some. For the rest of us, following our dream is more about inching forward, one day at a time, through the "stuff" -- good, bad and otherwise -- that is life.

Don't get lost, OK?