If you know me then you have heard the gripes in person, or you can read back a little ways and see it there (you don't have to go far - I'm not the most consistent or voracious blogger), but this season's weather smacks of my overall life theme for the last year. As soon as one storm blew through, another one seemed upon me. Mind, body and spirit were (are?) being tested to their very breaking point, or so it seemed. I felt like I lost many a good thing in that time . . . like, if that was a time of testing, many things that I held dear did not pass.
But then, perhaps it was time for me to open the hatch and eat my words. I had often (and now looking back, smugly at times) said that, until the honeymoon is over, you can't really know if what you think is all that good actually is. It doesn't matter what the situation is - it could be anything. A relationship, a job . . . name your station in life, and the rule will likely apply. Maybe if you took a couple sayings, like "Ignorance is bliss" and "The unexamined life isn't worth living" and a few others, and really gnawed on 'em for a while you'd get a taste of what I mean. Reality, bittersweet.
So some dreams died in this past year. Or maybe have just been put to bed, and will wake up someday. I guess, as I look back on some of them, and to play on the death metaphor a little bit, many of them are resting in peace. They were small, selfish dreams that were working with such limited experience and narrow vision. Kinda slipshod ones that were borne out of my twenties, an adventurous but mystifying and frustrating decade. One where I was very genuine, but in more instances than one, and frankly more than I really care to admit to most people and even one omniscient Deity, genuinely wrong about a great many things. I have particularly disliked admitting it to myself, my worst critic.
I have been encouraged by a mentor or two for a while now to reflect, to pray, to dig down deep inside, and to dream. And in response to what I find, to make a vision board, known also as a dream board, and surely by other names as well. Really, it was kind of a turnoff because the concept seemed somewhat infantile: get out a stack of magazines, a glue stick and a piece of posterboard or something to glue it to, and get to create a verbo-pictorial representation of what came to mind during reflection, prayer and digging. Now do I sound cynical or what?
I'm sure that if certain people are to read this, they may be surprised. I was once seen - and really, once saw myself - as someone who abounded in "vision". But, as I and my fellow adults will attest to, and as I wrote about above, there comes a time when the honeymoon does indeed end. Our life is examined, we are no longer ignorant, and yes, no longer blissful. Adam, Eve and the Emperor all realize they wear no clothes. Colin? Feeling like he's lacking in vision? What is this world coming to?
So God makes his children clothes and the life they thought they were to know and enjoy is obscured by a flaming sword. I don't remember what happened to the Emperor, but I'm sure he blushed. Adam and Eve were innocent, and the Emperor was swollen with pride - each had their presumptions, and each had to, eventually, face reality and move on with their lives. But move on to where? How?
Life can feel so much more mystical and meaningful when we are blissful. When we feel chosen by passions so strong and certain that they dominate us and leave us with no choice but to submit to them. If only the feeling could last! But as we are tested, that feeling may escape us, to be left only with our will (or at least it may seem that way) to be the determinant of our fate. At such a time, can one dream?
Only with courage. At times it feels like I'm coasting on momentum I gained in years past, with only inertia on my side. Like I'm living off the savings I put away for this rainy day I suspected would one day come (I, of course, speak in metaphor - comfortable wealth has yet to be mine). And yet, I and each one of us, whether we choose to believe it or not, has the freedom to choose. To choose to hope. To choose to create a vision, even if the one we once held dear has grown faint and dim. We will need the love and support of others to help us make these choices that can seem impossibly hard to make, as anyone who has had to confront such challenges will attest to, but make them we can, and make them we must.
"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keeps the law, happy is he." Proverbs 29:18
All of us at NieuCommunities went through a process of developing personal vision statements. I struggled deeply with mine in this stormy sea of life I am passing through; several revisions yielded this version: "I continue to search, missing and finding, and pray gratitude for both. I fall, but rise again, and hope for Heaven’s Mercy and Guidance to be upon me and my fellow man. May we know it deeply, and share it as we go forth together."
I know - it's vague, gender exclusive and all sorts of gloomy. But it is what I had, and I'm glad for it. And I'm glad that I have my life, with which to continue to write my vision statement, and the primary vehicle with which I will perform a most important aspect of it: living it out. Below is my vision board, which somehow came together after months of procrastination.
Maybe I'll describe it later. But now, it being 12:30 in the morning, bed.
May I . . . dream.
