This post is what the French call and Hors Sujet. It has nothing to do with Paris and it is uninterestingly personal. Consider yourself warned.
When I was a young bride in Montréal, I met this incredible woman, Anne-Marie. The instant I met her, I wanted to be her. She was beautiful, charming and oh-so-elegant. Her home was charming, she’d lived in Africa; she and her husband went to balls and belonged to the fine art museum and were simply perfect.
AM and I became fast friends. We’d go on road trips together, sometimes with our husbands, sometimes without. We explored the East Coast, California, and once, with 4 very young children thrown into the back of a truck, the small villages of Hungary. When my husband du jour and I moved to Northern California she and her husband pour la vie moved to Southern California. Then we moved to Paris and they moved to Nevada; we divorced, they moved to Chicago. Our lives have been an adventure.
One of the things that AM and I shared was our belief in Creative Visualization. There is a book with the same title and it was our bible at the time. Basically, we believed that to live the life you dreamed, you had to dream it. It was that simple. Dream yourself into a gorgeous Bordeaux château, and it would happen. Yes, we were young and naïve. LIfe is not that easy, it interferes more than one ever imagined, throwing financial crises, illness and heart break across everyone’s path. And our dreams were incredibly silly. Once you’ve lived a week in a château, you realize that it takes 20 minutes just to open the shutters each morning… its a LOT OF WORK. But we had our dreams and we both dreamed large.
AM’s dream was to have a boutique that supported local artists and artisans. Well, its not a shop, but 20 years later she has a very successful website that does just that and more as she supports and inspires women. Amazingly, despite the geography that separates us, I can say “I was there” when inspiration struck and AM came up with the name “The Succulent Wife“.
One year for the holidays my husband du jour gave me a “dream” journal; it encouraged you to define your dream job, your dream vacation, your dream day.
This morning, as I completed my second lap around the Luxembourg Gardens, that journal and the dream day filtered through my thoughts. In my dream day I had breakfast with my girls, went to yoga class and came home to run my photography studio before preparing the (organic!) evening meal for a dinner at home with the family. I wrote that 15 years ago. This morning I breakfasted with M, went for a run and came home to spend the day writing. Tonight we’ll be having a lovely home cooked butternut squash soup. The painting has changed a bit; E has moved away, I now run instead hit the mat, writing supplanted photography and my ‘family’ has changed more than I ever imagined possible. But the framework: its all there and its wonderful and terrifying at the same time.
Of course, I was a dreamer, so I forgot some of the important stuff. Like earning enough to make a good living, having a room of my own and finding time to give back to the community (as for the health and well-being of my loved ones, remember, I’m a Jewish mother, you don’t write that kind of stuff down…it will attract the evil eye (ach, ach, poo, poo) and anyway, you’re saying it in your mind with every exhale you breathe!).
I am off now, to buy myself another dream journal and fill in the gaps for the next 20 years and a warning for you all to be very, very careful what you wish for!
So you realised that you are living the dream….how wonderful! It’s beautiful when we have those moments of realisation when we think “yes”…this moment is good. this is it!
It’s not uninterested at all, it is your blog, to some extent is your life….. and I know this dream has come about not really in the way you envisaged, sometimes we go through pain to get there.
Its my observation that this “reach for your dreams” kind of aspiration is very much an American cultural thing. because I hear it often from American bloggers and writers. I could be wrong ( and this may be different with the younger generation) but I don’t hear British people talking much about fulfilling their dreams much. They may have ambitions and work toward them, but this is more subtle and it’s not as much taken for granted in the British psyche, that they can achieve anything they want, as in I observe in the American one, Maybe this is something to do with our class system. Subconsciously “knowing our place”…..I don’t know.
A year ago I wrote a blog post reflecting on peoples dreams. (sorry for the plug, but it is relevant) and your post reminded me about it.
http://denisefrombolton.com/2012/11/04/i-had-a-dream-musings/
The other day as I massaged his back and gave him an injection, I jokingly said to my now sick husband, “I didn’t sign up for this” and no, I could never have envisaged at that time him being ill and me being his nurse. But you know I also could not have envisaged how his illness has brought us closer and made me realise how much I love him and how in some ironic way his illness has made me appreciate our life and all it’s blessings and turn my pessimistic viewpoint around. and in an ironic way, which I never dreamed of …. has helped me fulfil the stated ambition from then of ……
“So maybe one of my dreams is to try to be a good person, try not to be grumpy, impatient and bad tempered, but most of all try to be kind”.
Savour the moment…. I am so pleased for you. Hugs.
Love Denise
Denise,
Thank you for your kind post. While I am not glad you and Michael are going through a hard time, I am very happy that you have found the silver lining.
You are being very diplomatic when you say that “reach for your dreams” is an American thing. In elementary school we are taught that any one of us in the room could some day be president. then a guy like Obama gets elected, and BOOM you are sure that any thing is possible. My 5th grade teacher would tell us to reach for the stars, because even if you don’t get there, you may still go further than if you had simply reached for the moon!
I am embarrassed by this kind of thinking because it is so obviously not true. I could realize my dreams because I had a strong, loving, supportive team of people and an outstanding education. Most of the world goes to bed so tired each night, they rarely dream at all. But for those of us who do have the luxury of enough food on the table, a roof over our heads and enough left over to travel, well, the more you dream it, the more you actually work towards it and the more likely it will happen.
Here is to dreams coming true!
Having read “Dreams around my father” I am a great admirer of Barrack Obama as a principled man, but he obviously did not grow up with the idea that he would one day become president. but then he grew up in Indonesia (and Hawaii) and went to a non American school… He too had a very supportive family even though his father was absent. I do wonder just when the idea that he actually COULD became president became a reality to him and what influenced it?
But what upsets me is that people look at him and see only a “black man”, actually he is just as much white as black.
My grandson has grandparents who are black, white, Irish, and Indian. He reminds me physically very much of Barrack Obama. A the moment at eight he is unaware of any of this, the world is his oyster, he wants to be a superhero and a musician! …. and of course to us he is just “Bodie”.
We have only once experienced racism. When he was about three we were in a supermarket and he came running up shouting “Grandpa!” The man Michael was talking to visible recoiled and said. “so you daughter likes black men! ” and quickly walked away.
Love Denise