photo credit:
Nina Matthews Photography
Change always makes me stop
and evaluate where I’m at, where I’m going, what I’m spending time on… my life, in other words, and if I’m “doing” it right.
A few weeks before Lily was born I was thinking about work, wondering how I would fit it all in with a newborn, wondering, once again, if I should listen to that overpowering voice of guilt that nags at me whenever I take time away from the kids in order to spend it on writing.
Does it know something I don’t know?
Growing up, I had a lot of interests, a lot of fantasies about what I would be and do when I was done growing up and was actually all-grown-up. Never mind the mythical nature of that statement, for now. Of course a lot of the things that seem great when you’re thirteen or sixteen or nineteen seem much less great when you’re twenty-two or (gasp) almost thirty. Or forty or fifty or so on.
The questions remain basically the same, though, even as the answers change.
- What is my passion?
- What is my dream?
- What am I really good at?
- What should I be doing?
- What is my calling? My purpose? My vision? My life’s work?
If only I could answer those questions (or even just one of them) with complete accuracy and confidence, maybe I could shove aside the fear, the guilt, the resistance, the inhibition, the hesitation. Maybe I could go for it.
If only I knew. For sure. No doubting.
Except it’s not that simple.
Many things in my life have fit nowhere in my dreams, but I needed them. They weren’t a passion or a desire, often the opposite, but they were good, gifts nonetheless.
- This house I’m living in, for example, with the enormous, spacious rooms and the ten acres of land and the bay window where my desk is parked and I can sit and type while a kid (or two or three) draws beside me and we can look out on a green field and an oak tree.
- Writing about and for small business, something I do and love but never anticipated.
- Lily, the fourth child who came a few years sooner than we planned or dreamed, and turns out, she’s just what we need right now.
On the other hand, some things I have known, with clarity, were mine, part of my life’s dream.
Joe, for example,
from the moment we met at age 14, has been my dream. 7 years of marriage later, the reality of life with him is even better than the dream.
Score one for dreams.
Motherhood.
Three kids in a row – and then four – one dream after another (even when our timing was a little off). Not blissful, but rich. Rich, enduring wealth. Dreams that have come, truer than I could have known.
Score two for dreams.
Score one hundred plus for the other unexpected, sometimes unwanted, unanticipated, undreamed events and experiences and relationships that have come, turning my life into something different and better than what I could have dreamed.
Sometimes pursuing your dreams is a bad idea because then you’re limited to what you can dream.
What if there’s more for you? What if you haven’t dreamed big enough, bold enough? What if your life is meant to be more than your dreams?
photo credit:
ChR!s H@rR!0t
How do you live in the space between?
The space between concentrated effort for what you dream about and acceptance of what happens despite the focus of your efforts, the fierceness of your dreams? How do you navigate life in that undefined gap?
It feels like a space with nothing to hold on to.
It’s more like tumbling, stumbling, hand-out-in-the-dark-grasping than walking any certain path. And that’s uncomfortable for us, with our obsessive planning, our agenda, our need for control, our desperate quest for security.
Isn’t security why we start asking those questions in the first place?
If we can figure this out – this who am I and what should I be doing and what is my life about – then we can get somewhere. Or so we think.
Let’s be honest.
How much of what we plan ever turns out as we anticipate?
Even if you plan to be a parent, is parenting anything like what you thought it would be? Or marriage? Or that trip to the other side of the world, or the intense effort and gratification of writing that book, or the bittersweet experience of revisiting an old friendship, or even the hour of solitude you anticipate and schedule into your life?
Is any of it quite what we expect it to be in the planning phase?
Isn’t reality much richer, and deeper, and stranger, and more unfathomable, and unnerving, and rewarding, than any of our dreams?
Isn’t it riskier, more dangerous, more subtle, more shadowed, and more fulfilling?
Dreams are great but we must give God room to go beyond our wildest expectation.
Just what I needed to read today! Thanks!
It feels like a space with nothing to hang on to. It’s more like tumbling, stumbling, hand-out-in-the-dark-grasping than walking any certain path.
Absolutely perfect wording!!!
Annie,
I found your site today by your post over at Life Your Way (I am a contributor). This post here is awesome and really what I needed to “hear” right now. I am all about pursuing dreams, but have often wondered about the constant striving to reach those dreams. The past few days have left me feeling a little empty even though I though I knew where I was going.
Your post hear has helped me understand a little of what I am feeling – “It feels like a space with nothing to hang on to. It’s more like tumbling, stumbling, hand-out-in-the-dark-grasping than walking any certain path.”
I need to step back and realize that God may have more in store for me than what I am dreaming. Let Him step in at those times when I feel lost, reach out and take His hand in the dark.
Thanks so much!
Bernice