Dreams | Shifting Gears

Far too often I’ve let a means become the end. “A magazine, that’s it. If we can get it on paper, legitimize the photos and words, then we’ve done it.”

“An in-person gathering. Bringing real people into real space and time to swap the stories of their lives, there we’ve got it!”

A blog. A podcast. A short film. You see? The mediums could change, but that no more legitimizes or de-legitimizes the dream itself.

“To reveal the truth about beauty through your story.”

That was the dream. That’s always been the dream, to tell stories and find the truth about beauty hidden inside them. Whether we do that through a conversation in person, a beautiful magazine, or some other medium, the dream still takes up space in the world.

So often I’ve gotten down on myself for not doing a thing (a dream, a project) in a big, impressive way. My fingers curl a bit at even typing that. I don’t like admitting it to you that part of why I do big things is to make myself feel bigger within them.

There’s this sense of bigness and importance when you reach a certain number of (you name it) ticket sales, comments, shares, emails. All of that can cause me to push back in an extreme way, or simply leave a project altogether.

Because my fear is that in serving others and sharing what beautiful truths I’ve learned in my own life I’ll forget the ones who are so readily within my influence. The people in my four walls and just a little further, those in my immediate community… I don’t want to miss them in an effort to serve a few more.

It’s a sort of mindful hospitality that I long to create here at Vv. A thoughtful invitation and the ability to say “yes, this is the best vehicle for our purposes now.”

But, can you see how shifting gears and redirecting could also be misconstrued and made to feel like a failure? Raise your hand.

Let me paint a picture. You start one direction, say a blog, then you have to shift and put it on paper, say a magazine, then you have another baby and making a magazine becomes obviously too great a burden, so you shift again to meet your mission in an honest and thoughtful way.

And you feel defeated. “That’s not the way I wanted to do it!” I can feel a small toddler version of myself stomping and clenching her fists inside of me.

But, a gentle, motherly voice reminds, you can do a thing many ways, this is not a failure.

To tell stories, to make space for the beautiful and to call it beautiful. Your life, my life, not as we imagine them, but just as they are. That was always the dream.

So, I want to encourage you today that if your dream has taken some twists and turns that you didn’t expect or particularly want and you’re still showing up, you’re doing it. You’re fulfilling the dream.

Because, as so many of us know, the urge to quit when it’s not gone to plan is a cheat, a critical and harmful voice. The voice doesn’t just asses your situation and offer practical advice, it says you weren’t ever cut out for this anyway, that you’re too selfish or dumb or disconnected to do this thing well.

Allowing the dream to shift and change to meet the current climate of my life helps me answer, “What is the dream, really?”

In fact, it deepens the roots, makes it that much more evident what the true dream is. As so many of us become mothers, or make a job change, or have unexpected job loss, etc. it might seem silly to “dream.” But, let me put it to you this way.

Dreams make make a mother out of a daughter. Dreams make a shop out of a building. Dreams make a home out of a house. Don’t stop your dreaming and when (not “if”) it takes a wild turn, press in and let the roots go deeper in your unforeseen circumstances.

Only you can tell your story and dream your dreams.

I’ll leave you with two favorite quotes from John Eldredge,

“Desire reveals design and design reveals destiny.”

&

“Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living.”

Article by, Emily Dean | Photo by, Molly Mahjer