Messy Dreams

I love pictures. In high school I had them plastered across 90% of my bedroom wall. I take thousands, organize them in folders on my computer by time periods and events, and I select my favorites to go in a scrapbook or to be blown up on a canvas. Whenever I see a breathtaking view, or my puppy is doing something cute, or maybe I just want to document the fact that I’m actually wearing make-up; I snap a photo or ask someone else to.

I scroll through Instagram more often than I probably should because I enjoy living vicariously through other people’s photos. I use these photos to paint pictures in my head of where I’d like to go and things I’d like to do.

When I look at a photo I wonder where and how it was taken. I marvel at the colors in a sunset, the vastness of landscapes, and the complexity of subjects. I think about what the photographer went through in order to get to that place, or what caused the person to laugh. Some photos make me linger in awe, some remind me of a moment I wanted to savor and cause me to recall the details of that day, and some are hardly ever looked at again.

I love photos because they inspire me; they inspire me to hold onto the things I’ve seen and seek out the one’s I haven’t yet.

I also love to read. I used to devour fiction, now my preferred choice is adventure memoirs, travel, and running. They make me want to go somewhere cool, explore, meet new people, train for a race, or maybe write my own book.

Words spilled onto a page suggest someone has had experiences worth telling about. When I read I am taken to another place. I am transported through years of hard work, disaster, and success in a matter of days. That journey leaves me hungry to take on my own adventure, to accomplish something.

I am empowered, challenged, and elated. I revel in the experience; I learn eagerly, embrace the encouragement, and dwell on words that resonate with me. I have so much fun reading, though at the same time I want to put the book down and run out the door to experience a story worth recording.

Reading takes me to a place within myself that feels so familiar it as if the author has read my own thoughts and wrote them down for me. The phrases echo inside of me because I have pondered them before, and I marvel that someone has put that thought down so elegantly. At the same time, reading surprises me; it introduces me to a part of myself that I have never met. Those phrases cause me to pause. I linger on them, roll them around to feel their texture and try them on. It’s wild and enlightening: a thought that had never occurred to me and yet it is what I feel is true. Those phrases are like stumbling upon a glorious place I didn’t know existed; first striking, but then welcomed and eagerly embraced.

Both photos and words have a kind of power over us. They entertain and inspire. They make me want to do all kinds of things. Maybe I’ll drop everything and go on a year-long vacation. Maybe I’ll finally start truly, dutifully eating healthy. Maybe I’ll start my own business. Maybe I’ll write a book. Maybe I’ll do an Ironman.

Maybe this… Maybe that… What I have is a whole lot of messy dreams. I want to try something, go somewhere. I want to excel at something. I want to go everywhere. There is not one dream to accomplish; there are swarms of them! There is no big game plan; there’s just day to day ideas and the excitement that swells and then dulls around them.

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the number of things there are to do and also the things I long to do. There is no time in the day to do a little bit of everything. I don’t think there’s time in the week either. I’m not even sure there’s enough time in the month.

My ideas lay scattered around me, calling to me, begging to be given attention. When I return home from work my mind is full to the brim with thoughts of creative endeavors yet depleted of the energy to pursue their completion. I crave sleep instead of hours to work on the plans that have bloomed inside my head throughout the day.

I stare at the photos on my wall of the places I have been, and I long to travel again. I read a book, and I want to write my own story; thoughtful, moving, inspiring. My dreams swirl inside my mind and I struggle to pluck just one from the stream of thoughts, grab it, and set to work on it.

I must learn how to build my reality with the building blocks of my messy dreams.