Dreams and wishes and midnight musings
I should be in bed right now, but I'm not.
The last few weeks have been hard because I'm beginning to discover that I'd gotten sort of used to being able to bring about the reality that I wanted and saw for myself by dreaming hard and working harder. I'm coming to discover that sometimes, when that reality involves other people, no amount of dreaming or hard work will make them come along with me (at least not at the pace I'd like) and so the best I can do is work hard at being patient and encouraging. I'm not very good at being patient. I wish, sometimes, that they made patience pills. I could certainly use a few.
I believe, despite my total lack of patience and strong desire to control my own destiny, that things unfold as they are meant to. Which means that most of the twists in life lead to unexpected doorways and new paths ... and that there are many, many ways to create the change one hopes to see in the world, therefore it is better to marry oneself to the change and to the goals than to the precise roadmap for getting there.
(For instance, my overarching life goal has been to help LD kids, especially ones with dyslexia, because that was the particular learning disability that I grew up observing and knowing and seeing how hard it made life... and how hard it made life in ways that it really didn't have to).
I've thought a lot of ways were the "right" ways to go about making the kind of change that I wanted to see or at least help start, and rejected them one by one. It starts to wear, after a while, to keep rejecting pathways because they wander into dead ends... even though the journey was probably useful. Those are the times that I need to remember the dream... and maybe give myself permission to flounder or drift, a little, and do something else and let the ideas and opportunities come together in such a way that a clear path emerges.
I know, intellectually, that everyone (or most people, anyway) needs to feel validated -- like who they are or what they do or which lives they touch and how they touch them is in some way important. I imagine we all want our choices to feel like good ones, which is why we argue so passionately about things like religion and politics. I wish people in general were better at validating their own existences and choices without having to invalidate those of others. Even when that kind of invalidation isn't intentional.
I wish I could make it not hurt when I see those kinds of invalidation happening to me and I know it isn't intentional from the people responsible. I think, sometimes, that if I were a better person, I could rise above it, that I could really, wholly accept the good intentions and ignore the sting. But maybe "better person" isn't a productive way of looking at it. Perhaps feeling the sting means I'm human; perhaps it means I have some growing to do. I hope it means I still have some growing to do, in a way... as much as I sometimes wish I had things "all figured out," I think I'd be very bored if I actually did.
This is a distillation of a number of very intense and difficult feelings. But, there is little perspective when there is little distance and so I am separating my thoughts and my emotions, briefly, in the hopes that adding a bit of distance between the two will give me some useful perspective.
I am, at the end of the day, very, very lucky. I have a beautiful life full of amazing people and I think I would do well to remember that more often.
Goodnight.