Death of a Dream

During my vacation in September, I read The Pilgrimage, a novel by best-selling author Paulo Coehlo's.  It had a number of several exercises that I thought might be helpful in my upcoming retreat, which I dog-eared, as well as a some passages that I wanted to note.  (When I have finished with a book, it is well-marked with lots of pages turned down.)

The night before I started my retreat, I pulled it out and looked over some of the passages, and one which spanned several pages was about the death of a dream.  Now clearly I had not just read this passage but had read it carefully enough that I'd marked it for a return visit, but I really didn't remember it.  Yet as I read it on Thursday evening, I did so with great attention.  In the almost month since my retreat, I have continued to "chew" on the passages.

The passage is a conversation between a spiritual teacher/guide and his student on the Compostelo de Santiago pilgrimage in northern Spain.  The teacher is telling his student how/why our dreams die.  "The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams," the teacher says, "is our lack of time." Those who have read this blog for awhile will know that this immediately grabbed my interest.  My dream of writing regularly, even for this blog, has seemed to be gobbled up by lack of time.*

As I reread this passage, I looked at it differently.  The teacher doesn't say the dream dies from lack of time.  He said that we kill our dreams because of our failure to make them priorities--to make time for them.  Suddenly, the lack of time for writing has moved from a passive thing that is out of my control to the deliberate and active action of killing my own dream.  I am keenly aware of the choices that I make at this busy time of the year.

"The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties.  Because we don't want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life...we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those engaged in battle.  For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what's important is only that they are fighting the good fight."

Hmmm. Fighting for our dreams. Sir Winston Churchill once admonished: "Never give in. Never give in.  Never, never, never, never..."  I know that fighting the never-give-up fight for all of our dreams is not possible or even wise, which means that we have to choose the ones that we really fight for and which we allow to languish.  Yet, more often than not, I do not make conscious decision to let go of one dream so that I can consciously put more energy--more fight, if you will--into a more important dream.

"The third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace..."** I am passionate about using my special talents and gifts.  Doing so may be seen as a "dream."  But I do have more than one gift.  I like to think writing is a gift.  So are dance, gardening, and cooking.  When I do any of those things, I do fall into what approximates a peaceful meditation.  I lose track of time.

When I write, I also lose track of time, but I also wrestle with angels as I struggle to find the truth of what I want to say.  When I was younger, I was much more certain what was true.  Now, not so much.  I am reminded best-selling writer and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's work The Four Stages of Faith in which he described those who were most dogmatic as having a lower level of faith than those who have gone through a period of questioning and understand that faith is almost never black and white.  My writing dream may have succumbed to the more peaceful passions of dance, gardening and cooking. Questioning is work, often hard work.

What bothered me most as I first read, and continues to annoy me when I reread Coehlo's description of the death of a dream is what happens when we allow a dream to die.  "...Dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being.  We become cruel to those around us..., and one day the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death."***

I am not suicidal, nor do I expect to be.  However, I have from time to time begun to feel the rot of dead dreams within me...before slipping back into the peace of auto-piloting through life rather than fighting for them.  I don't believe I've been cruel, but I certainly do become irritable from time to time.  Some days I just don't like myself much, and I believe those to be the days when I feel the rot of abandoned dreams most strongly.

In five weeks I am supposed to leave the temporary assignment I've enjoyed so much and return to my regular job.  Over the last two weeks, I have occasionally felt physically ill thinking about going back, even though I am returning to an almost completely new leadership team.  My new boss is someone I've worked with from another location, and I liked working with him a lot.  There is some toxicity left among staff that I dread, but as I've pondered, in my heart of hearts I am certain that my nausea is about going back into a situation in which I fear that my dreams will once again succumb to the fast pace of day to day work that doesn't inspire me.  What The Upanishads call "The sleeping state that men call waking."

I will write more on another day about consciously choosing to let go of a dream, but, for today, my learning is to just keep my dreams conscious until I intentionally let go of them, rather than letting them rot and making me a person I don't like very much.



*Coehlo, The Pilgrimage, P. 57
**Coehlo, The Pilgrimage, P. 58
***Coehlo, The Pilgrimage, P. 59