Writing Life – To Let Go of your Dream
Being stuck in a dream I cannot get out of has stopped me from finishing my book.
A few years ago (June 2018), I had a dream about writing a book. It was a large dream. It was a dream about becoming a writer. It was a dream of pushing myself really hard. It was a dream of accomplishment. The dream came packaged in a beautiful box filled with beautiful words, words that would inspire people, help people, and change the world.
I believe the only way to write your book is to give up on the dream of the book. The dream of the book is always a distortion of what it actually will be and the only way you really know what something will be is by doing it, by giving it space to breathe and come alive, to let it grow into what it wants to become. A book has a life of its own once you start writing it. The dream of it was only a precious box you can see from the outside. It is all golden and shiny. You have no idea what’s inside of it. But you wanted it.
Dreams get you excited. Dreams highlight a desire. Dreams are just the beginning.
Maybe the Bhagavad Gita is right that we have to let go of the results and believe the work will give us meaning. When thinking of a project, we are always caught up in thinking of the product, and we never think much about the process. The work is hard and messy. But the magic happens when we let go of those achievements and just do that work. It is all about falling in love with the process, not the product.
It is in the doing that the clay is molded. The art that lives inside of the dirt of our minds heats up and comes alive when we touch it. We need to touch it. We need to feel it. We need to smell it. We are part of it, but it is not us.
It is what we do. The process is an opening between you and the divine. The work gives us that portal.
That is the truth in so many things in life. We have dreams of things we can do. They area always fantastic when let our imaginations go wild, but nothing ever turns out as you dreamed it, and that’s okay. I think people get discouraged because the inflated idea is always so much grander than it could ever be. The illusion of that greatness, that perfect thing, stops people in their tracks once they realize that life can never be exactly what we imagined it to be. Creating something is hard work. It chews you up and spits you out. When things change and the idea begins to turn into something else, and they do, we have to be able to pivot and roll with the punches. The unexpected is always out there. It shakes you up and pushes you hard, causing a roller coaster of emotions. The suffering in life offers us clues to what life wants to become and fuels our creative endeavors. It is in the breakdowns that there are breakthroughs. It’s hard, but therein lies the magic. To be fully engaged with life we should harness all of what happens to us.
You must take action and step over that threshold, walk into the dream, and keep moving, watch it change and morph and always have faith that the work will help you. The work will open up the magic.
It is a paradox that I am living right now. To have the dream and then let go of it. In the end, once you let go of the dream, it rewards you with the beauty of the process. That is what I am learning. Just keep working.
