Like Kate Winslet, I, too, used to practice my Oscar acceptance speech in front of the mirror when I was eight years old.
But I don’t any longer. Instead, last night I propped my swollen ankles up on a few pillows, threw an old baby blue blanket over my wriggling belly, and polished off the organic truffles I bought at EarthFare on Thursday while watching Kate Winslet, all glamorous and beautiful, give a real, live, it’s-actually-happened Oscar acceptance speech.
And, the thing is, I don’t really wish I could trade places.
How Dreams Shift into a Love of the Here and Now
It sounds so sad when I put it right out there. I no longer dream of the day when I will be an actress (or even — I’d make due — a screenwriter) resplendent in her Oscar gown, hair and make-up perfect, posing for the shots that I will examine in tomorrow’s newspaper to tell myself that, yes, after a lifetime of wondering, I can finally say that with the right team making it happen I, too, can look like a real movie star. The closest I come to such dreaminess these days is wasting fifteen minutes in front of the bathroom mirror pretending to be interviewed by Terry Gross. On the radio. Where no one will see me.
I spent a lot of years doing the actress dream, even when I had long stopped making the slightest move toward pursuing it. It wasn’t about scanning the pages of People magazine wishing I could lead that celebrity lifestyle. Far from it. It was about this seed of something inside me that cried out to be a different person from the one I was raised to be. It was the creative woman living in my heart who couldn’t figure out how to navigate her way around the expected road blocks of academic classes and a reliable job into a place where she could flourish in real life.
I’ve always acted; I’ve always written; I’ve always created. From the time I was four years old playing “Here Comes the Witch!” with my best friend Jessica (who, not incidentally, now works in entertainment) to the after-school drama class in third grade where I played a fairy godmother in navy-and-white-striped knee socks that I remember as vividly as I recall spinning around and acting silly and making the audience laugh. From the moment in ninth grade when the Drama Production teacher boosted my shyly self-deprecating soul by casting me as the ingenue in Dracula to the following fall when he showed great confidence that I would return to acting despite having chosen to take Spanish 3 instead of drama during my first year of high school.
Oddly, it was the law firm that drove me back to acting — professional (as it turned out, and I was anything but) classes at the Studio Theater in Washington, D.C. And, from thence to community theater in Williamsburg, Virginia, while I was going to grad school. It was there, in our early thirties, that an actress girlfriend and I spoke with great earnestness about moving to L.A. to be actresses. And, of course, never did.
Slowly, I ratcheted down the dreams. I moved to St. Louis to be a law school professor and held Oscar parties for friends I knew better than to tell to dress up. I started writing spec scripts for t.v. shows and got an agent in the hopes of working as a television writer (creativity with the comfort of regular hours (when you have a job) and a sort of recognizable work environment). I even moved to L.A. and continued to believe it would happen, had coffee at the table next to Brad Pitt’s at the Starbucks on Beverly and Poinsettia, took yoga classes with Katie Holmes, moved to Long Beach, wrote a novel.
Could it be that becoming a mother sapped my creative dreams? It doesn’t seem likely, seeing as Ms. Winslet has two kids of her own and seems to be flourishing in her creative life.
No, I think it’s becoming a YogaMamaMe that’s done it. And “it” doesn’t mean sapping any creative dreams at all. “It” means living the life my heart leads me to and not judging or predicting or pretending what that might be. Even when it turns out to mean sitting in my pajamas at my desk overlooking my street in Asheville, North Carolina, writing a blog that a hundred people might read on a good day, and awaiting the birth of my second child.
Why Our Minds Trick Us Into Believing There’s Something More
It’s hard to be conscious of being still instead of striving for something “more.”
I recall long discussions with a former therapist about why I so hated the idea of being “content.” To me, it signified doing what was easy, settling for a life as a lawyer or law professor because it came so readily to me, giving up on dreams of something shiny and unknown, settling for the spotlight of a podium in front of a class of civil procedure students rather than the red carpet at the Kodak Theater.
What I couldn’t see at the time was that my life wasn’t static and, furthermore, that dreaming about that red carpet was, in fact, the thing that was holding me back the most.
Sure, we hear stories all the time about little Penelope in her small town in Spain watching the Oscars and dreaming. About eight-year-old Kate holding up her shampoo bottle and practicing her acceptance speech.
But for most of us, far away dreams are a big empty burp away from current reality. And we don’t know how to get there. So we concoct a way in our minds. And the more we concoct and dream and tell ourselves we should do things that maybe don’t feel right and therefore never get done, the more we ignore what our hearts are willing and ready to do. And the more we stagnate.
Take, for example, having kids. Or adopting a child. Or adopting a pet. If you thought about it too much, you might never get around to it. So much work. So many practical difficulties. So far from where you are right at the moment, absent responsibilities and full of potential for dreams. But your heart overwhelms your head and you do it anyhow.
It works the same way with the rest of life, too. Or it should. We just live in this culture where work isn’t supposed to be so fun or fulfilling that we don’t care if we get paid to do it. (There was, I’ll admit, a brief period where I agreed with many of my professor colleagues that I was really getting paid to grade exams because the rest of the job was so terrific I’d do it without pay. Turned out that wasn’t really the case.)
In fact, it occurs to me that it’s easier to think that way. That we need some things that are solid and dependable and that we don’t have to feel our way toward. Because it calms our minds, I suppose. I mean, if I had to choose every move in my life by what felt right, I couldn’t see where I was going. I’d just have to trust that it was the right direction and that I was in the right place at the moment.
Oh yeah. That’s what I’m trying to do right now.
It’s scary, taking a step back and admitting that the large, unglamorous woman watching the Oscars alone on her couch is who I’m happy to be and that I no longer dream of being the beautiful movie star in the perfectly draped gown with the hairstyle that miraculously survives the windy walk down the red carpet. Because if I let go of her, do I let go of my youth, my dreams, my chance at being someone special in this life?
Okay. Youth — overrated. What could I have done then that I can’t do now? Or, rather, that I won’t be able to do when the kids are a little bit older. My dreams — are they figments of a mind that is interfering with my heart, conditioned by a world that doesn’t know what I really hold inside?
And my chance at being someone special in this life — that, I fervently believe, is already a truth if only I look around me. To my son. To my life partner. To the people I am lucky enough to touch and be touched by.
It’s just a matter of taking my mind off the photo-shoot dreams and taking a look at all that my heart encompasses in the here and now of a life that is — creatively, glamorously, perfectly — all mine.
The Journey of a Full Asana Practice
I offer here a full asana practice that you can tailor for where you are and how far you want to go. The idea is simply to live in the moment, to let it take you where your heart wants to go, to quiet your mind, and to experience what my practice has brought me: the realization that if you are living in love, you don’t need the dreams.
Instructions for Living in Love/Letting Go of Dreams Sequence
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Those flying bushes carried us far and put us down gently exactly where we should be. xo
What a lovely thought — that I am still flying along magically with you, surveying the ground beneath our feet that has changed so, so much in the past 38 years.
OK, I’m beginning to understand the possibility of all the things I may learn from you.
And I have a proposition for you!
I’ll email it though. ; )