Don't Become a Ghost Ship
A boat with no one steering it isn't peaceful. It's just lost
Too often we look to outside sources to define our own place in the world, and until we find that place for ourselves, drifting is exactly how it feels.
Returning to postponed projects or ideas you set aside is an opportunity to define your place in the world at this stage in life.
Sometimes a project gets set aside, and you couldn’t really tell you why. Not abandoned, exactly — just set down. And then, days or weeks or even months later, you find yourself pulled back to it, wanting to finish what you started, with an enthusiasm that surprises you as much as anyone.
That pull is the same mechanism behind reclaiming a personal dream.
Reclaiming a dream does not require a plan, a full overhaul of your life, or a demand that the dream come back exactly as it once was. It asks something much smaller: pause, remember what the dream once felt like, and let yourself actually feel it again — the freedom, the excitement, the aliveness of it, whatever it was for you.
Then carry that feeling forward.
My favorite way to do this is to write love letters to myself, reminding me of the time I dreamt of being a bohemian in NYC. I recall all the feelings by doing so, and that exercise allows me to choose to revel in them as often as I want. Love letters to our younger selves work wonders for recalling the essence of a dream that had been set aside.
Let it move into whatever project you’re circling back to. Let it move into your everyday life, quietly, the way one new color can shift an entire painting without anyone being able to point to exactly where the change happened.
Taking the time and effort to recall the dreams that were once yours, and bringing their essence into your present life, is worth every bit of the effort it takes. The payoff is clarity — your soul begins recognizing the memories you’re bringing forward, and in due course, produces new ideas of its own. This does not happen overnight. But it happens with a subtlety so strong you will find yourself reaching for, and thinking about, something you had not given a thought to in many, many years.
What you gain is not a finished project or a fully rebuilt dream. What you gain is clarity — clarity about the choices in front of you, and clarity about how you want to think of yourself at this stage of your life.
I painted this little red boat years ago, but now I see it differently. It is still afloat, surrounded by beauty, but it is not choosing a direction. It is drifting.
I think many women reach this stage of life and mistake staying afloat for living. Reclaiming our dreams is how we put our hands back on the boat and begin choosing where we go next.
Maybe you’d like to be part of our exciting BREAKTHROUGH weekly gathering of women who are choosing to stop drifting by reclaiming part of their lives they thought they’d lost. We meet every Tuesday via zoom. This is for my paid subscribers. Perhpas you’d like to invest in yourself?