Insights

Dreams

I’ve spent a fair amount of my adult life in serving others. I helped initiate three of my children into adulthood and single-handedly provided them the support they needed to launch out on their own and start to accomplish things and discover their dreams. While doing this, I put many of my own dreams aside and fell full into serving society, family, and others. That singer and dancer stood in the wings waiting for her turn to perform. In light of life’s little dramas, getting the kids off to school, helping them graduate from high school, and preparing them for college, the performance had to be placed on hold; and the artist writer stood, pen suspended in air, for her time to create.

In the meantime, the world has continued at its pace, and like the raisin in the sun, the dreamer’s dreams seemed to shrivel. All the while the singer and dancer ached to escape the mind’s barriers and make the appearance now.

I am that artist, that dancer, that singer, and that writer.

One day I realized that another moment waiting to find my passion was a moment ill spent. I got in my car and drove cross-country. I drove from Florida to California with only a few of my belongings.

I decided to materialize my dreams out of what seemed to be nothing, and I must say that I am starting to see them become reality.

It takes courage to make changes. It takes the type of courage that causes you to go against tradition to follow your dreams. I should have laid mine down a long time ago to be replaced by responsibility. Working and making a living took precedence for many years, but did not lend me happiness.

I have a friend who emigrated here from India. His long dream to be an actor has finally taken hold in America. He had to make many sacrifices and practice a kind of selfish virtue in order to start to see his dreams materialize. He left family and friends. He set out on the impossible task of learning the acting craft and then someday performing.

“Pressure, I know pressure,” he says. “Pressure to do what your family wants, pressure to do what is right, pressure to make it in a world where you often feel unwelcome.”

In spite of all the pressure, however, he still makes time to take acting classes where he has to let down defenses that were ingrained in him from his youth, taught never to disagree or argue. Taught to be nice always. He is now letting those barriers down to allow opportunity in. He has to pause and ask, “What is it that I truly feel?” In recognizing his true feelings, he can perform and become himself in any character.

I face a similar challenge. I’ve spent a few years caring for others, putting my dreams and myself last. Now I have more freedom. With that freedom I am faced with what do I do now? For so many years all I wanted was the opportunity to do what it was I truly desired: sing, write music, and learn to play the guitar. I’ve been conditioned to seek out something useful to do to ensure that others are cared for. I now am faced with the task of countering that conditioning and discovering what it is that makes me feel fulfilled and truly happy.

Lately I’ve been leaning toward learning the guitar, taking time to dance, and making room for an ever-expanding spiritual side that has lately grown beyond my ability to contain it.

What happens to a dream deferred? In my case, as Langston Hughes so eloquently states, it explodes!

Once your dreams are allowed to spill over, there’s no knowing where they will lead you. In my case they’ve led me to California, three thousand miles from where I started.

Written by Lisa Trimarchi