The Thirteenth One.

Afternoon,

Subheading: From Dreaming to Doing.

"It's hard to jump from dreaming to doing. As every architect or designer knows, there is a critical step between vision and reality. Before imagination becomes three-dimensional, it usually needs to become two-dimensional. It's as though the unseen order needs to come to life one dimension at a time.

    Women have sent me so many of their two-dimensional dreams over the years. They say: "For me, the truest, most beautiful life, family, world looks like..."

    I marvel at how wildly different each of their stories is. It's proof that our lives were never meant to be cookie-cutter, culturally constructed carbon copies of some ideal. There is no one way to live, love, raise children, arrange a family, run a school, a community, a nation. The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal. We can throw out all the rules and write our own. We can build our lives from the inside out. We can stop asking the world what it wants from us and instead ask ourselves what we want for our world. We can stop looking at what's in front of us long enough to discover what's inside us. We can remember and unleash the life-changing, relationship-changing, world-changing power of our own imagination. It might take us a lifetime. Luckily, a lifetime is exactly how long we have."

-Glennon Doyle

As some of you are aware, I have recently been reading the book Untamed by Glennon Doyle. If I could best summarize what I've read so far, it would be in the above passage.

Reading that made something apparent to me that should have been already, which is... writing, for me, is my imagination in two-dimensional form. I do not simply write to process, but to plot, to build. The words I type become paragraphs, and those paragraphs build a narrative. That story is so much more than a dream to me- it's a carefully laid plan. 

I have such lovely plans for my life; such lovely dreams. 

It never seems to matter how far fetched they are, or how unrealistic. My fingers click-clack away on my keyboard as if laying paving bricks to forge a path for me, and I am shown the way. I've always known the way, but I haven't built the road until recently. 

What does this mean? Another passage:

    "The memos I've written for myself are neither right nor wrong; they are just mine. They're written in sand so that I can revise them whenever I feel, know, imagine a truer, more beautiful idea for myself. I'll be revising them until I take my last breath.

    I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths. My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation, and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself. The goal is to surrender, constantly, who I just was in order to become who this next moment calls me to be. I will not hold on to a single existing idea, opinion, identity, story, or relationship that keeps me from emerging new. I cannot hold too tightly to any riverbank. I must let go of the shore in order to travel deeper and see farther. Again and again and then again. Until the final death and rebirth. Right up until then."

I was told very recently by a partner, "I feel that you have these ideas in your mind- some that are realistic and reasonable, and then some that are dreams that simply cannot come true."

What that person meant was that they could not come true with him. My dreams, as they stand today, are not his dreams. There is not space for me where his dreams exist. This wasn't said to be cruel, and was not anything I did not know. We have discussed the space we can (or can't) make for one another multiple times. 

However-

Later that same day, I was having a conversation with a close friend of mine. She was sharing her dream of owning a bookstore, and I said I loved the idea of having a coffee shop. I instantly painted a portrait of a side by side operation where she had her bookstore, I had my coffee shop, but they connected in the middle. I laughed and jokingly said I was sorry for hijacking her dream. 

She said, without missing a beat, "Most of my dreams have plenty of room for you."

That sentiment was planted in me, and three days later, it is this blog entry. 

It's rapidly spreading; an uncontrollable notion. 

Sometimes dreaming can morph into two dimensional planning, then to doing, and sometimes it can't. Whether it can or can't has nothing to do with loving someone or not, and people get confused about this. They think, "If I give just a little more, love a little more, sacrifice a little more, dream a little more, then..." 

What they're forgetting, what I forget in certain moments, lost in my plots and plans, is that the person standing in front of me has their own set of dreams. Often it is the case that it is not possible to square two conflicting realities struggling to emerge. Two people that love one another shouldn't expect or want their partner to forgo their dreams. That isn't love.

We all wish our partners had room for us in their dreams. Some do, and it's not even a question. However...

Love is supporting and encouraging your partner as they become more actualized versions of themselves, wherever that journey takes them- even if that's away from you. Even if it ends your partnership. 

It is, as Glennon said, a million deaths and rebirths. There are moments in our lives that will feel like we are dying when we are actually simply being reborn. It's in the smile we offer instead of tears while saying goodbye, the silence in place of pleas, and heaps of words we don't say so our partner is free to use them to speak their truth. 

You have such lovely plans for your life, such lovely dreams. 

Chase them all. 

As always, I hope you enjoyed this stuff, and come back for more things.