The dream killer

I saw this quote (by Suzy Kassem) recently online, and it struck a chord. How many of us never attempt to follow one of our dreams because doubt stops us? I'd wager there are many people whose dreams die in this fashion. Doubt/self-doubt is insidious; it may begin with a negative or critical comment from someone whose opinions we value. But from then on, the ever-present negative voice inside us does the rest, feeding the self-doubt until it dominates all the other feelings we have. 

Moving out against self-doubt is one of the most difficult things you'll ever do in life. But it's necessary. Better to take the plunge into the unknown and take the consequences than to never do so. Better to 'have loved and lost than never to have loved at all', as the old saying goes. Better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. It's too easy to convince ourselves that we won't be any good at this or that. 

But if you do overcome self-doubt and attempt to fulfill a dream or two, don't necessarily think that life will be easier. A new set of problems arises in the form of some few people who really don't want to see you succeed no matter what. They remain silent no matter what you do. They never comment one way or another. They are passive. They don't get excited for your small successes, or for a compliment that is given you. Their silence is deafening and tells you all you need to know. They are behaving in an envious and petty fashion. Many people who are trying to realize a goal get stuck here too; they don't want to 'offend' those people by not staying in their place, under the radar. As I wrote in a poem a long time ago, 'if he could not advance, then it was her duty to demote herself'. That is what it can feel like. 

So, here's to all the people who try to conquer their self-doubt in order to realize a dream. Cheers. 

The melancholy of the intangible

I read a quote recently that resonated with me--something to the effect of 'you can miss a place or a time in your life without necessarily wanting to return to it'. It got me thinking about the intangibles of life in more general terms, about those places we cannot really reach inside ourselves and that they are the places we can never really explain or truly define. We remember them, but how does one define memories? What are they really? They represent something very important to us, but we cannot reach them, cannot touch them, cannot call them up all the time at will. Sometimes they are triggered by a smell, a room, a touch, a word. They point to places inside ourselves that are intangible, and it is often those places that make us melancholy, perhaps for how life 'used to be' or for some other feeling that tugs at our souls for attention. The melancholy comes from our minds and souls, comes from that part of us that is spiritual and not material. The spiritual is another intangible. I have often written in this blog about how my life used to be--as a child, or a young adult, or an employee starting out in the work world. I understand after having reread those posts that I write with a certain melancholy, an intangible feeling of sadness or even grief, that really has to do with my soul's acknowledgment that time on earth is passing and that there is nothing I can do about that. Even if I told you that I miss certain times from the past, I could not return to them even if I wanted to, because the laws of physics deem that impossible. I can of course return to them in the realm of imagination. That is the stuff of novels and dreams, and the basis for much of science fiction. The ideas of time travel, parallel worlds or non-linear time appeal to me; I find science fiction oddly comforting. 

I have just finished reading Joan Didion's collection of California essays entitled Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Her writing is tinged with a melancholy that I can understand, especially when she writes about the Sacramento of her youth (where she grew up) and modern Sacramento. They are not the same and never could be. She knows that. But still. My favorite essay is the one where she writes about saying goodbye to New York City after having spent eight years there. Goodbye to All That captures so many of the reasons why young people come to New York City and why many of them never leave even though they should, because their dreams are gone and/or they are wasted and wasting time (their lives). I could understand her reasons for being there and for wanting to leave. I could relate to her talking about the wondrousness of the city, seen for the first time, walking down the city streets, stopping in to a small shop for a snack--all those things. I remember liking the city because I could be anonymous there; I could start over as many times as I liked, and no one was there to tell me not to do that. But of course there are only so many times one can start over, and only so many years that one wishes to remain anonymous in order to start over. She writes about the city being a city for the young, not for the old. That is because the dreamers come to the city, wanting to be successful, wanting to live out their dreams of becoming famous writers or actors. But the same could be said of Los Angeles and Hollywood; many waiters have waited tables there for years, waiting for their big break in Hollywood that will never come to pass. Many stay 'too long at the fair', as Didion describes it. I could relate to her absolute weariness of going to parties and hearing the same things said over and over again by the same people; at some point, you must act on the weariness or go crazy. You cannot listen to the pipe dreams of others for too long. You cannot listen to the bullshit for too long. If you do, you will be mired in the mud of inertia, and it will drag you under. You will become cynical. You can grow old in the city and never realize that until one day you wake up and it smacks you in the face--the realization that you are midway through life and that you have to do something with your 'one wild and precious life' as Mary Oliver writes. In Didion's case, she seemed to have had a nervous breakdown of sorts. But at the same time, she married her boyfriend; he took her back to California, her home state. It seemed to help her, as both he and she became successful writers. I like her fragility, her humility, her ability to insert herself quietly into the lives around her in order to observe and write about them. She was not aggressive in her dealings with people. But she is tough and unflinching in how she writes about their lives and about herself and her approaches to life--she is not afraid to write about her melancholy, about crying at the strangest of times and not knowing why, about being weary, about being human. Her essays are essays about the ironic, contradictory, messed-up lives around her (including her own) that constitute humanity. She writes about the melancholy of life, the melancholy of the intangible, in a way that makes me want to read more of her work. 

Why I loved La La Land

If you haven’t seen La La Land, the movie musical that won and lost the Oscar for best picture in the space of a few minutes (it was mistakenly announced as Best Picture at the Oscar awards), see it. It was nominated in fourteen Oscar categories, and won ten of them (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3783958/awards). The Oscar fiasco is quickly forgotten when you slip into the world that La La Land creates. I am not a real movie musical fan—it’s not my favorite genre—but if more of these kinds of musicals are made in the coming years, I may become one. The songs in this film are lovely, catchy, bittersweet and memorable. There is an air of respect in the movie that is rare these days. It was a refreshing change to experience that level of respect for nearly everything in a film--respect for the genre, for the actors, for the plot, for jazz music, for acting, for individual dreams, for good manners, for courtship and good old-fashioned romance (more important than one often likes to admit), for serious conversations, and overall for the art of movie-making. That art is on display in full force in this movie—stylish lovely sets, historical references to the Hollywood of a bygone era and to a Los Angeles of a bygone era as well. It’s a dreamy, dreamlike film in some respects that has its feet firmly planted on the ground in most respects. Boy meets girl, they don’t get together right away, and then they do. Both are talented individuals who have big dreams, and whose pursuits of those dreams unite them in a common cause. They love each other and they want the other to succeed. And when the other doubts himself or herself, they are there to remind them of the bigger picture, the goal, the big dream. They are there to remind them to never give up. Neither of them do. I loved pretty much everything about this movie. It evoked just the right amount of nostalgia for a (presumably) more innocent time, the longing for a time in one’s life when everything was still new and untested, when love was new, when conversations between people mattered as a way of getting to know them. It illustrated the importance of striving tirelessly to achieve your dreams regardless of the outcome (not always a happy ending), of not compromising or settling for the job that gives you the most money, of believing in yourself even when everything seems to be falling apart around you or when the voice of reason is telling you to give in and settle for less. Along the way, we are treated to acting that tugs at your heartstrings (Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were wonderful together and singly) and a story that reminds you of that time in your life when dreams and love were new and your future, largely unknown and somewhat daunting, was ahead of you. There were some really good dance numbers and some memorable songs. I found myself humming one of the songs (the one that Ryan Gosling whistles when he is walking out on the pier) on the way out of the movie theater. The director, Damien Chazelle, makes it clear that the typical Hollywood happy ending as depicted in the fantasy sequence at the end of the film is not always the ending in real life for those who achieve their dreams. Boy and girl don’t always ride off into the sunset together. We need that reminder, even though we are rooting for the couple to be together against all odds. Sometimes we experience a love when we are young that transcends us and our real lives, and we are not ready for it. Or it may simply serve another purpose—to bring out the best in ourselves and to help us achieve our dreams—and that kind of love is to be cherished for a lifetime. 

Reflections on the afterlife

There are dreams that you remember long after you’ve had them. They leave an intense feeling in their wake, the kind of feeling that you can carry with you for the entire day after you’ve gotten up. I’ve had such dreams, albeit not many, but those I’ve had often have to do with being visited by loved ones who have died. Both my father and my mother have visited me in dreams, talked to me without my responding, or we have had short conversations. I don’t always remember the specific words we’ve said to one another, but I do know that they are very real dreams and that the messages are not garbled or nonsense. Recently, I’ve had several such dreams, and it got me to thinking about the afterlife. I am starting to really believe in an afterlife, and I have come to that belief after many years of skepticism about its existence. I grew up with the idea that life continues on after death, and I’ve wanted the afterlife to exist. According to my religion, it does exist in the form of heaven, purgatory and hell. It’s been depicted in countless poems, novels and films, all of which have made a huge impression on me. But my skepticism kept me from fully embracing a belief in it. That has changed. It also changed because I began to seriously question the idea of love ceasing at death. How can it be that we work so hard to learn to love in this life and that we love the people we love, only to see that love die with death? It makes no intellectual sense to me, and I tend to reject arguments that make no sense to me. So that too has pushed me to embrace a belief in the afterlife, a place where love lives on, because that makes sense to me.

I searched for afterlife on the internet, and found this description of it on Wikipedia-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife

In philosophy, religion, mythology, and fiction, the afterlife (also referred to as life after death or the Hereafter) is the concept of a realm, or the realm itself (whether physical or transcendental), in which an essential part of an individual's identity or consciousness continues to exist after the death of the body in the individual's lifetime. According to various ideas about the afterlife, the essential aspect of the individual that lives on after death may be some partial element, or the entire soul or spirit, of an individual, which carries with it and confers personal identity. Belief in an afterlife, which may be naturalistic or supernatural, is in contrast to the belief in oblivion after death.

This description does not mention dreams at all. Suppose that dreams are part of the afterlife, or at least a portal between this world and the afterlife, through which deceased loved ones can talk to us. Perhaps there are other portals as well. I’m not actively looking for them, but perhaps deceased loved ones need to get in touch with us (albeit infrequently) for one reason or another—to give us a message, to reassure us, or to guide us. Nearly every such dream I’ve had has had to do with something I’ve been wondering about, and I’ve gotten the answer, or at least some semblance of one, in the dream. My mother telling me that she was fine, my visit to the beautiful house where she was living, or telling me that she was worried about someone in the family, or my father telling me that something I had written was good and worth sharing. I trust these dreams; I never wake from them thinking that they are nonsense. I believe dreams are a way of being able to have contact with those we loved who are now dead, or a way for them to contact us if they know that we subconsciously have a desire to talk to them. Now at Christmastime, it makes more literal sense to me when I read the passages describing how Joseph was visited by an angel in his dreams that told him to take Mary and Jesus and leave Bethlehem because Herod was going to search for Jesus to destroy Him, and that they should flee to Egypt. Joseph took his family and fled to Egypt because he trusted the dream and the message.  

It is easy to pay lip service to the ideas of an afterlife, of heaven, hell, purgatory, of resurrection of the body, life everlasting—all the things we say we believe in as Christians. I wonder how many of us really ponder the meaning that lies behind what we profess to believe in. I know most people want these things to exist, but that is different from knowing that they actually do. Most people, myself included, take it on faith that they do exist. But the scientist part of me has always been looking for proof throughout most of my life, for clues, for answers, and I have come to believe that the visitation dreams are evidence that the afterlife exists.

Things I’m never going to do

Read the news this morning and saw that there had been a meteor strike over central Russia early this morning, causing sonic booms and pressure waves that led to the implosion of glass windows in many buildings, injuring nearly one thousand people in the process. The social media age being what it is, it didn’t take long for the first videos of the event to appear on YouTube. Pretty incredible to watch and listen to what was happening in the sky above us. Tonight the asteroid 2012 DA14 is supposed to pass very close to the Earth (over 17,000 miles above us but it’s the closest asteroid pass that scientists have measured up to this point). It got me to thinking about life as we know it, and what would happen if an asteroid or meteor of great size crashed onto land or in the sea, and life as we know it changed forever. This is the stuff of sci-fi movies, but the interesting thing about sci-fi is that you never really know when or if what is depicted in books or movies will come to pass. And perhaps it’s better that we don’t know.

A lot of people think about what they would have done differently when they are faced with their own demise or the demise of loved ones. I’m of course no exception. We live our lives each day with a certain amount of conviction that our ‘tomorrow’ lives will be pretty much like our ‘today’ lives; we trust that tomorrow will come. And that has been the case up to now. If we have anything to fear, it is in the form of man-made threats such as nuclear weapons and the threat of biological warfare, that the crazies in the world will get their hands on these things and end life as we know it.

I thought about what I have accomplished in my life up to this point, and about what I still want to do, if given the chance. But I also thought about all the things I haven’t done, and they perhaps define me just as well as the things I have done and accomplished: I’m never going to climb Mt. Everest, or any mountain for that matter; I’m never going to fly a small plane or learn to pilot one; I’m never going to do tandem skydiving or bungee jumping; I’m never going to do deep-sea diving; I’m never going to sail in a small boat across a large ocean for days at a time; I’m never going to run a large corporation or lead hundreds of people; I’m never going to make a million dollars a year, despite what life coaches tell me (to dream big); I’m never going to own a large palace or an over-sized mansion, a yacht or a wildly-expensive new car; I’m never going to travel the entire world. These are things I'm never going to do, and I'm very ok about it. 

If I won a huge lottery, I’m fairly certain that not much on the above list would change—perhaps I would purchase a new home and a new car, and then share the money with people I care about. The things I do not want to do have little to do with money, or better stated, it’s not the lack of money that prevents me from doing them. I simply have no desire to do them. What I do want to do more of in the future is to spend time with the people I care about, doing the things we enjoy together—hanging out, talking, relaxing, eating out, going to movies or concerts, traveling a bit, shopping, and being on vacation. When I think about my life in this way, it makes me happy, because I already do so many of these things with the people I care about. If the end of the world came tomorrow, there's not much I would have changed about my life. And I hope I feel the same way in ten or twenty years, if we and the Earth are still around.