Pursuing deferred dreams

A Dream Deferred

By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Waking up from a lack of dreaming

I enjoyed Langston Hughes' poetry when I was in high school, it was clever and sounded deep.  March Moon always made me want to giggle, but made you feel fancy when you recited it with a straight face.

When I was about 25 I rediscovered his work, or more accurately I found myself in A Dream Deferred.  I looked in the mirror and discovered that I wasn't what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I am strong, vital, fierce, brave and driven. Or at least that was who I was inside.  The outside- the part that everyone else was seeing- had become fat, soft, boring, a simple and tamed mom.  It was horrifying to find myself trapped inside the person I had become.  It was like a bad sci-fi where you wake up someplace strange, with a new face and an unfamiliar life.

That realization reawaken my deferred dreams and set me on a new path as I began trying to fight and crawl my way out the body I had become trapped in.  The dried up passions and dream that had sagged like a heavy load, that part of me was reanimated.

Looking forward

New Year's Eve tends to get people thinking about what they have accomplished on their goals.  People set grand new resolutions.

As I considered where I've been and where I am trying to get to, I happened to come across this article from John Maxwell about Dreams Deferred.  I know about dreams, how they nag and ache on good days, how they "stink like rotten meat" on the bad days so that you have trouble smelling the roses where you already are.  If I was to get a tattoo, it would probably say "unused potential festers."  When those dreams have seemed to move further out of reach, I felt the angst of Hughes' poem and the "wave of negative emotion" that Maxwell described.

Rereading what Maxwell wrote, I am struck by the idea that "dreams are pictures of our purposes" and that "a leader's dream only hints at the richness and wonder of her God-given purpose."    It hadn't occurred to me that a broken or unobtainable dream could really be a looking glass in which to better see yourself.

Maybe some of my dreams have passed too far out of reach,but I'm not ready to concede defeat yet. I still have paths available to me and plenty of fight left in me.  But I think John Maxwell is right that looking at the dreams that have been a part of me for so long can shed light on who I am meant to be.  And that more than one path can lead me there.  It makes road blocks and dead ends a little less scary.

A rather vague postscript

I know this is all frustratingly vague about what my dreams and goals actually are, but they are still a part of me that I hold close.  As long as I actively pursue these dreams, they just feel too fragile and personal to expose openly.  Maybe its a fear of public failure.  Or, more likely, its like making a wish when you blow out the birthday candles- you fear you can't tell anyone or it won't come true.