So hard to live the dream

The fire of life finds its way. What becomes known cannot be forgotten. Try as we might to suppress the wisdom which pushes us onward, forward, away, all we do when we ignore it is stoke the flames. But instead of being warmed by them, we get burned. There is no turning back. 

Why is it so easy to dream a dream and so hard to live one?

I can see it all so clearly, it torments me in my sleeping dreams. Slips away when I awake. It is no closer or farther, but duties and doubts don’t have much power in the REM world. Then the alarm clock rings that dreaded iphone tone on a Monday morning and we are back to being leveraged, back to being known for what we did in the broken past, back to owing money and needing to make it. 

I’ve known what I wanted for a long time. Meant what I said. Been so close. Then it gets scary to say it out loud. The deepest part of the id reigns in the excitement, remembering the wincing pain of disappointment as clearly as the searing pain of grabbing a hot pan for the first and last time. Could I really be that person?

We are so close to breaking the cycle, surfing the wave of chaos to a new shore. The gap between what we are and what we admire is just as small as the chasm between who we are and what we hate. It is all right there.

Within the single body we are given is a myriad of lives. Who we’ve been, who we are, who we want to be. The hurts that haven’t healed, the traumas we haven’t forgotten, the giddy dreams we still dream and still can’t believe come true. It all wars within us, the human forms that commute and convene, laugh and cry. It dyes the fibers of our being, gets passed on to those who come after us. The wound of someone we never even met spills inky blood across the pages of our lives, transferred from one to the next. 

I swear to God, god, gods, this ends here.

Wouldn’t it be alright to sit in a hot spring in the desert and look out over the sunset? To miss out on whatever else is out there but to be here, really here. Not missing out on this because the cost of a dream feels too high. The cost of missing the dream is infinite, it is compounding, it is like a short sell on the stock market that cascades until a safe bet collapses the hedge fund. Part of the dream is that you are here beside me, and that you want to be. But I can’t control that part. All I can do is show up, be exactly who I always said I was, and do the things I always said I was going to do. 

Getting to where we really, really want to be means sitting in the stillness with every hurt, disappointment, and failure of life. It means ripping every Bandaid off and staring at the scar until its shape becomes a part of our beauty, becomes something in our souls, as if I could pass the gashes on to my kids because they are so much a part of me. It is knowing that the real reason we failed is because we were so afraid of succeeding, because the last time we got excited we got hurt so, so badly. Once you are here, shivering, naked, stripped of the shackles and stitches, then you need the warmth of the fire of life. It becomes something that saves you, not something that consumes you while you’re busy being distracted by Fool’s Gold.