Dreamers

9.12.06

I met a man with a dream today. Of sailing around the world with his new career as a nurse. He does not have a sailboat. He does not yet "know how to sail". He does not even yet have his nurse's degree. But he has a wide open smile and bright eyes and broke the dress code at our New Hire orientation with jeans and a bell pepper red woven shirt. He is working while getting his nursing degree, looking towards actualizing his plans. We laughed about being rebels at this corporate "indoctrination" while at the same time counting our paid vacation days with glee and nodding sagely at the HIPAA compliance rules. In every crowd there are the renegades and the dreamers and it's always a delight to meet them.

The thing is, I believe we are all dreamers, even those of us in the oxford shoes and the wing-tips and the required pantyhose. We dream in utero of meeting that muffled voice of our mother, we dream when we are born of the waiting breast, we dream of super-heros and sky-scrapers and unicorns and of shaping the world in our interest. We dream of true love and vital work and nice things to own. We dream of the future and the past and ways to recreate them.

My father was a dreamer, fortunate enough to have been born into a family inheritance that allowed him to follow those desires in the form of building and sailing boats during his summers. My mother was a dreamer who left her straight laced mid-West family and found herself in 1950's Greenwich Village. My husband did the same leaving his small town life in the South for NY and I got myself over to Zaire with the fantasy of helping an entire continent contracept their way into stable population growth (ahem, what was I thinking?). My daugther, all 8 years old, dreams of getting into Harvard and my son of directing movies. I have friends who dream of renovating houses, of re-marrying well, of new jobs and fresher horizons and a better car. Our culture sells us dreams and the stuff they are made of.

But how many of us dare to live them, to risk what we think works for something that might work better? Who are the few who shrug off the "shoulds" and grab a "what if?" to wear? Are we happy to live out our dreams in the form of gargantuan cars that remind us of tanks or purport to take us hiking even when we don't own a pair of sturdy boots? Do our boob jobs and face lifts really make us feel youthful again? Do we keep dreaming of a greener pasture once we have aquired, nutured and harvested the one we have? Are we so stimulated these days with ideas and images of what could be that we are never content with what we have. Or do they really just play upon our core values: Nature, intimacy, vibrancy, vitality, creativity, procreativity, spirituality, connection. These are all the things we seek and Madison Avenue would have us believe we need products to ensure we get them.

And so, we don garter belts to get around the dress code, and wear our hair long or our secret body parts pierced, and visit prohibited chat rooms and read romance novels and find some small ways to fit those dreams into our lives, when we can't, or daren't take the risk of realizing them. We listen to and tell stories (in book, film, musical or art form) to be transported to those places we wish we could inhabit. How truly liberated we would be if we could live in those magical places without suggestion of where to find them, if they could come from our hearts, our pulsating souls. Perhaps then, we would not suffer in silence, in isolation, seeking solace in our vices, but rather find our joys, our peace, our vibrancy, our connections in a world we have managed to make real. Garter belts while swabbing the decks anyone?