Today’s article is a bit of a mind-bender, so bear with me. It came about as I was involved in three lines of thought and related activities: I was weeding, I’ve been writing, and the subject of “living your dreams” is never far from my mind.
Let me paint the scene. Here in the lush Northwest, things grow year-round, with a bit of a lull in wintertime. Recent warmer temps, rain, and some sunny days have started our brisk growing cycle again. And the first things to thrive, are the weeds! (That part is important; I’m coming back to it.) I love my yard; I got to design it when we moved in 5 years ago. The last couple of years of my distributing homemade compost full of weed seeds, plus my inattentiveness in the last 6 months, has made for a bumper weed crop. I finally had to do something, or I figured we might get thrown out of our neat little development.
So there I was, crouched, squatting, kneeling – yanking out weeds. I really got to see how weeds can eventually choke the life out of the plants you want there. Let’s call the plants you want there, the bones. The bones of the yard were hard to find among the thriving weed crop.
Now let’s move to living one’s dreams.
The analogy I want to use is one of “bones,” in the sense of the following definition: Bones: The fundamental plan or design, as of the plot of a book. The life of your dreams, the one where you are fully living your life purpose, also has bones. In fact, the dreams themselves are the bones.
So how do you identify the bones of your dreams? How do you tell which parts of your inner landscape are weeds, and which are those dream-bones?
Natalie Goldberg’s great book, Writing Down the Bones, encourages forming a habit of timed free writing. Very much like Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages” in her fabulous creativity booster book The Artist’s Way. The point is to keep writing, letting whatever is happening in your brain come out on the page. No sitting and thinking, no forming the “right” words. It’s a mind-dump, in a sense. It is also an incredibly revealing practice. Over time, those bones of your dreams come dropping out like jewels. In the middle of writing what you want to eat for supper, you suddenly find yourself writing “I always wanted to be a pastry chef.”
Come along with me to one more book reference: The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho. This is a fable about the need to become aware of and embrace our personal calling. I would call that our Life Purpose. Paul wisely lists 4 main obstacles:
- Uncovering our buried dreams
- Fear of losing love
- Fear of defeats
- Fear of realizing our dream
We’re just talking about #1 right now. Most of us were told (or shown) so often that what we wanted was impossible, that we buried our dreams. Sometimes we’ve buried them more than once. The deeper the disappointment, the deeper we’ve buried them.
Creativity, like writing, is the perfect shovel for disinterring dreams. We engage with our right brain, and it uncovers those dreams with unerring accuracy.
Once disinterred, you still need to discover the bones. Sometimes the dream had one shape, but the bone-quality of it can be applied in a direction you haven’t thought of. For example, the list of things I wanted to be when I was 10 years old looked like this: actor, singer, dancer, performer, artist, writer, musician, and gardener. (The last one was an oddball thing that I didn’t actually discover I liked until age 40!) None of those things became my professional life in the way I longed for. But the bones of that dream list, is creative expression. That’s what I’m all about doing, and what I’m all about helping you do. I’m using creative expression in ways I would never have thought of.
Now you have the bones, you can give them some real live muscle. We’ll talk about that next week!
Coach’s Challenge: What did you want to be when you were ten or eleven years old? Write that down. Now list all the reasons you can’t/couldn’t do that. Look at that list! Those are the weeds. They have grown so abundantly, you actually believe they are the real bones. They aren’t. Pick a trustworthy friend, and talk with them about what your dream was. (Don’t ask their opinion about it. They will be the mouthpiece for those weeds until you change your own beliefs). But ask them to help you brainstorm what the bones of that dream are. You may be surprised. Let me know what you discover!
