Freeing yourself from the tyranny of the dream
It’s around your mid-thirties that you start looking at where you are and saying huh? Which is why you will notice that your forties are when most people start thinking about making money in earnest because they realize they are going to need it or they get married and get busy having that child so they can have the family they wanted.
Mid-thirties to mid-forties is when a lot of people take stock of the whole picture – have I had that child I wanted? am I really happy with this person? what do I want to really do with my life? – so it seems there is a lot of industry around this age group – people getting busy getting what they think they want.
The truth is that the *Come to Jesus* moment happens somewhere in this range too – for me it was around 45 – I realized that some people are blessed with their dreams come true (QED, my husband) and some people are blessed with the courage to realize theirs haven’t come true and the strength to free themselves from the tyranny of the dream (uh, that would be me).
There is no sense in feeling pointless because life hasn’t turned out the way you wanted it to – because there are other dreams to be had. So when I felt at 44, reclining on my leather couch in Marin County, staring out at the hill directly in front of my house, that I was entering the denouement of my life, I was blessed by a radical transformation – a different dream, a hurricane, and a complete deconstruction of my life as I knew it that has allowed me to rise like a phoenix from my own ashes.
My dream of the future is still undefined – I prefer this to the claustrophobic certainty of where I was headed before – I don’t want a plain vanilla life – I want to be open to all possibilities and to surround myself with traveling companions who are also open to all possibilities. As the director of my own narrative, I might not be ready for the denouement for a very long time – it might be that everything doesn’t get wrapped up in a tidy script till hours before the ending.
Not everyone in this world gets to fully enjoy self-actualization – so finding it is a blessing. My new dreams suit who I truly am and I’m thankful that the world was large enough to let me go there.