Dreams and Diatribe

Saturday morning, my husband woke up unrested.

I was trying to decipher what he was saying over the jackhammer hum of my Sonicare, but my lip-reading is a little rusty. I gave up, hit the pause button mid-brush and sloppily spit out, "Whash?"

He slumped his shoulders and just waited.

Wiping the toothpaste foam from my lip, I repeated with perfect diction, "What was that?"

"I am going to go into work this morning and tie up a few loose ends."

"Really? But it's Saturday."

He nudged his toe against the bathroom sink, "I know but I spent all night dreaming about work and I won't be able to enjoy my weekend until I get some stuff done."

I was kind of falsifying my grumpiness about him having to work on a weekend, since I was doing some self-promotion stuff downtown Nashville until 4 p.m., but working on a weekend just seems wrong.

As I was wiping down my face with a washcloth, and my husband was rummaging around in the closet for a hat to cover his bed head. How awful to have to dream about work on your day off?

And then I tried to remember my dreams from the night before.

Ah yes!

Jason Mraz and I were at the airport waiting for a flight to Hawaii and he fell in love with me in under an hour and was torn when we had to part ways in paradise.

Hmm...someone may be a little more steeped in reality than I am. But what are the purpose of dreams if not for departure? Sleeping is supposed to be sketches of some kind of Tim Burton movie, one in which we experience these dashes-upon-dashes of grossly unrelated musing. In no way are dreams supposed to mimic that of real life.

Then dreams just become anxiety.

This was all bumbling around in my brain as I was thickly putting on lipstick, dark eyeliner while styling my hair in a fog of hairspray amidst a concubine of bobbing pins.

I was pulling of the tags from the new clothes that I collected for the appearances that I had scheduled for that day at Fanfair, and I wondered when do the dreams that we have for ourselves cross the line from undying hope into the birth of unabashed angst?

When you are a "struggling" anything, people always ask questions like, "Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?", "What is your ultimate goal for your life?", "Did you always want to be this "struggling" fill-in-the-blank?" "When do you feel like you will finally arrive, what will that moment look like?"

What absurd questions.

What absurd ideas, that there are even such moments. Moments where we actually have the ability to see beyond our messy everyday diatribe into a neatly stitched future. Like we have any clue about what may be waiting around the bend. Its all just acting. Answering questions like these are impossible.

But it isn't impossible to imagine what life could be like in our ideal world. in fact it can be these imaginings that send people of into spirals of self-induced want and can incur unfocused foolishness.

A girl who was a friend of mine at one time was looking for any reason and every reason to get out of her marriage. If it wasn't one thing it was another. There was no grounds for her feelings other than she had imagined for herself a life in which there was no limit on her credit card, no vacation she couldn't take, and no amount of designer clothing she couldn't' have.

She built her life tightly wrapped around a thin string of saccharine. A fake sweetness that would never satisfy her and only leave her wanting something that was never real in the first place.

I have been open and honest about my struggle for finding fulfillment in my life. I share a similar affinity for surface desires as that girl did. I dangle "what if's" from every corner of my heart and find myself personally wounded when one gets blown away by some reality like age, lack, or laziness.

For me a dream isn't a dream if it creates a chasm between where you spend your everyday and where you ultimately want to be.

I know that there is room for improvement in every one's life- that is the beauty of the evolutionary process, we get older we get better jobs, we get better at what we do, we learn to grow up and let go of certain addictions and soul afflictions.

But as trite as it sounds, happiness is found in the small things. In watching someone you love sleep. In getting good news. In listening to your heart beat after something it was meant to create.

While, I am still somewhere between living my dreams and living my anxiety, I think I am beginning to see myself and my goals more clearly.

My husband worked a half of a day on Saturday and closed a really big deal that he had been working on. That is a little part of his dream coming true.

One person's anxiety is another person's empyrean.


And I am at peace again, which for me is the whole point of dreaming in the first place.