On being a Dreamer

Or not enough in the moment

Photo by Jr Korpa

Well, that was a refreshingly calm and uneventful week. The kind of weeks that I like, in flow, in the moment and everything working well together. Very enjoyable indeed.

For some reasons, that I could not explain, last week was a week simply being and it felt great.

Catching up with house keeping, house admin, no laundry nightmares, eating fairly healthy meals, friends, dinner downtown, Karaoke party, Baileys and Christmas movies. It felt good to be in control and focussed on the day to day.

I took a step away from obsessing about the future and it was a nice break from the self induced mental exhaustion of the last few months caused by asking myself the “what next?” question over and over.

I less than 4 years the boys will take their first independent steps, that’s when my youngest will graduate from High School (say WHAT?!) so I am desperate to start planning now, to ease the anticipation of it. Four years doesn’t even seem long enough!

At times, the idea of an empty nest really freaks me out and I imagine a life without endless grocery trips, or picking up wet towels of the floor every morning while muttering “Oh FFS, how many times?!”. It doesn’t look pretty and I already miss them.

At other times it feels liberating, exciting, expanding and I see us walking the streets of Rome, eating in the most refined restaurants, enjoying time without having to compete with a phone and AirPods and I love to hang on to these dreams for a little while.

Between C and I, I am the dreamer. Sometimes I am too much for him. He is in the moment, focussed on what’s here and now and I am the one who needs to see the direction and holds the map. I get frustrated when he doesn’t get the vision and I nag him often to share his. He struggles with that and I find it hard to understand.

So I try to be patient, most of the time.

I have always been a dreamer, but also a Do-er. I remember the countless hours spent dreaming of the life I wanted to have once I was past the present. At the time it was a coping mechanism. Growing up, I always needed to visualize the future to see me through the life I wanted to escape and I was making plans and elaborate strategies to take me to the places and experiences I was after. The visualisation usually looked like me somewhere abroad.

Today although I no longer want to escape, I still need to see the horizon, I am not one to stare at my feet on the road. And the dream is to go home, a bit like old elephants who go back home to die (actually, do they?). Well except that I want to make the most of it for many years before dying. Ok this is taking a darker twist.

Life is for living, right? I want to do, to experience, to try, to fail, to succeed, to see, to discover… and I need to regularly ask myself what is the next thing.

My dreams have always been my compass and I have known from a very young age that only taking action would make things happen. So I have always worked hard, I seized opportunities and I always focussed on the solution never the problem.

Fast forward to now and I still have to hang on to a dream in order to find contentment in the life I am currently living, even when that life makes me happy.

I like to think that by doing so, I am creating and shaping Life as I would like it to be.

A couple of years ago, I stopped dreaming. I felt stuck in the present, scared of aging, away from home with no hope, or plan of ever moving back. I felt like life was going to remain steady, with no real problem, but no real excitement either, boring. It was one of the worst time of my life.

I don’t know how to rest. Sometimes it is difficult and I wish I could just go with the flow a bit more often but then I am scared that boredom would settle in and that life would become too difficult to bare.

Finding balance would be a good start I guess.